Cast: Taapsee Pannu, Vinodhini Vaidyanathan, Anish Kuruvilla, Sanchana Natarajan, Ramya Subramanian, Parvathi T
Director: Ashwin Saravanan
Verdict: A layered suspense thriller with a strong social commentary but a weak plot – best for a watch on boring Friday nights with friends.
Game Over is a Tamil-Telugu bilingual suspense thriller, dubbed in Hindi, and based in Gurugram. It invites the audience to an anxious journey – a series of unfortunate events in the life of Sapna (Tapsee Pannu), a female gamer who suffers post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to a violent incident in the past involving fetish porn. Sapna is stuck in her own mind’s game navigating through dark alleys of fear, stigma and pain. Will she ever make it out alive?
The game begins with Sapna’s first on-screen encounter with darkness that triggers a panic attack. The film uses nervous camera work and vivid sound tracks to create an experiential episode for the audience encountering Sapna’s attempts to escape the maze of her own mind. Much in the same way Sapna encounters the maze in pacman, the game she plays every night. Game Over is a meta narrative about games, crime and horror.
Crime is shown always lurking around in the film using conventional symbols – an eerie empty house, CCTV camera footage, new-age lock systems etc. It is probably no surprise then that the film is based in Gurugram, a city infamous for crime and murders. But Game Over’s criminals are not your everyday neighbourhood thieves– they are serial killers that torture women, behead them, burn their bodies and take this all in camera to create torture porn.
Game Over’s weakest point is its forced paranormal angle – brought in through a prelude about a dead girl Amrutha (Sanchana Natarajan), another victim of torture porn. Amrutha’s memorial tattoo ink (an ink made with ashes of a dead person in an attempt to immortalize them) is accidentally mixed with Sapna’s tattoo. This tattoo begins to mysteriously act up and brings out a parallel plot about the murder of Amrutha (also a cancer survivor). The scenes between Amrutha’s mother and Sapna are aimed to infuse in her, and perhaps other women, the will to fight against violence and win this game. However, these scenes are dragged and misplaced.
The film questions the culture of violent media consumption – why do we like to buy torture porn, play violent games or watch suspense thrillers like Game Over? The sexism behind violent media is clear in the film – men watch Sapna’s gory torture videos openly in coffee shops. While Sapna grapples with the stigma and guilt induced by her parents who blame her for this incident because of her lifestyle – living alone, getting tattoos and attending new year parties.
Fear is the central theme of the film, but unlike other suspense thrillers where fear is associated with the paranormal, here fear is diagnosed by a psychiatrist as a mental illness from unprocessed trauma. Sapna suffers from insomnia and PTSD and she plays pacman every-day to escape her anxiety. The film unpacks this relationship between fear, sexism and horror media. So do we all need to pay visit to the therapist for wanting to watch horror films or play gory games? Probably not but its worth a thought.