Follow Us
Join UsStar Cast: Nayanthara, Haniya Nafisa, Sathya Raj, Anupam Kher, Vinay Rai & ensemble.
Director: Ashwin Saravanan
What’s Good: The idea of the movie and the world it decides to set it into. Also, how technically sound it is.
What’s Bad: It chooses to only scratch the surface and suffocates in its own constraints.
Loo Break: Nothing so bad that it puts you off till a point you ignore. But you can if it can’t wait because there are predictable bits too.
Watch or Not?: I would suggest waiting for its OTT release since you aren’t missing anything big if you miss it in the theatres.
Language: Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam & Hindi (with subtitles).
Available On: In Theatres Near You.
Runtime: 105 Minutes
User Rating:
A mother (Nayanthara) and her daughter (Haniya) are tested positive for COVID-19 after the demise of her husband. In Quarantine the daughter decides to summon her father’s spirit to talk to him and ends up opening a gate for a demon instead. A ghost and the quarantine become a deadly match quite literally.
Connect Movie Review: Script Analysis
Going forward as we live in the post-pandemic world with its effect still feeling strong (God this feels like talking about the Thanos Blip), it is going to be an interesting thing to see how filmmakers see it and how they weave stories around it while reflecting on the time we as a collective went through. Few weeks ago Madhur Bhandarkar released his take with India Lockdown, an unfiltered yet confused take on the phase. Now comes in Connect, a whole new idea and one that has a lot of mettle.
Written by Ramkumar Kaavya and Ashwin Saravanan, Connect is a story so fresh that you can relate to it because most of us have been imprisoned in our own houses in the past two years. Now, what if one of the members was possessed by a spirit and there is no way you can get out of the house? There is a whole lot of substance and power in this idea which the two even partially explore.
The biggest hurdle is to create a perspective. Who exactly is watching this unfold in a house with two participants? So the makers take the Searching or C U Soon route where the majority of the movie takes place through Zoom calls. So the person on the other side of the call is your window into the world. The movie is technically very sound. It uses every possible thing about the Zoom ecosystem to create intrigue. Be it the recording, the buffers that the network creates, or even the noise that it quickly catches. One can see the efforts.
Talking about the haunting part of it might take away the fun. But one cannot ignore how predictable it becomes when it solely gets into that space. This draws your attention to the lack of emotions. For a story about a parent about to lose their child has no emphasis on it or doesn’t let that angle breathe at all. Rather there is a melodramatic scene that lands nowhere followed by an exorcism attempt that we have seen in multiple films. Even the world-building beyond the conflict is weak because it appears like done to just fill a void and give the characters an identity.
Connect Movie Review: Star Performance
Nayanthara is very invested in telling this story and the fact that she is craving some new experiences is evident with the fact that this is much different than her latest outings. The actor tries her level best to make this character work but the aforementioned emotional draught affects her arc too.
Haniya Nafisa plays the possessed daughter is amazing for a debutant. She manages to irk you and even scare you a bit with her few out of the blue. Sathya Raj adds a whole lot of melodrama to the film which does feel like a misfit at points.
Anupam Kher’s performance though is the weakest of the lot. It feels like he was hired the same day he shot because he is literally reading everything out of a paper kept behind the camera. At least it looks like that. He never becomes the character.
Connect Movie Review: Direction, Music
Ashwin Saravanan does walk into this one with a very ambitious vision and one can see it through how he envisions and plots the entire narrative. But only the main conflict will never land well if the world is not built as a whole and with the same conviction.
DOP Manikantan Krishnamachary does have a tough job in hand and he does it well to an extent that idea of watching the film through screens lands well. The background score is apt and good.
Connect Movie Review: The Last Word
Connect is a great idea that deserved much more than just good technique.
Connect Trailer
Connect releases on 22nd December, 2022.
Share with us your experience of watching Connect.
For more recommendations, read our Ammu Movie Review here.
Trending
Follow Us: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Youtube | Telegram | Google News
