Director: Ashwin Saravanan
Rating: **
Game Over is a story which revolves around Sapna (Taapsee Pannu) who has a phobia for darkness and leads a lonely existence. She stays in a spacious bungalow in Gurugram solely with her maid. A brutal murder in the past has a strange bearing on her condition. Can she pull her act together when fear comes knocking once again?
The crime need not have a 'cause'. Sick minds can have a fetish for torture porn. To watch people suffer, beg, plead, run for their life, gives them a kick. The voyeuristic murderers here belong to this category. They track down women who live alone, break into their homes, behead the victim, burn the body and capture it all on their video camera.
This ambitious film, on the contrary, tries to give the crime thriller a psychological, horror, metaphorical and spiritual twist - an experiment that partially evokes paranoia but mostly evokes boredom stemming from the film's defiance to rationale.
Sapna is a work from home gamer. The story tries to draw parallels between her situation, the virtual world and more. The desperate urge to connect the dots looks forced instead of clever. The effort to make the story seem deeper than it actual is, feels unnecessary and deceiving.
Set in a house throughout, the film would have perhaps worked better had it solely focussed on its protagonist and her psychological upheaval and trauma. The events that lead up to the climax are repetitive, languid, inconsequential beyond a point and thus take away from the unnerving buildup. Despite a shorter runtime, the film seems never-ending.
Taapsee Pannu is sincere but her performance isn't a revelation here. She has pulled off such fearful characters with conviction before. The director's attempt to infuse panic works to a certain extent. His inability to get deeper into Sapna's mind and analyze her worst fears, make this potentially promising game a damp squib. It is engaging and atmospheric but largely convoluted and unprovocative.
