35 mm: Game over.

35 mm: Game over.

***Fortified with Spoilers***

Ashwin Saravanan’s Game over is a blend of genres. Is it a supernatural horror movie or a slasher film or a psychological thriller? It’s a mix of all. Taapsee Pannu plays Swapna, a gamer with a PTSD, living estranged from her parents. Post her traumatic experience in a New Year's party, she is afraid of the dark, tries to limit her going out of the house or even meeting people to the bare minimum, has riddled her house with security cameras and lives just with her maid and a security guard stationed near the gate.  There are reports of serial killing targeting young women and on a New Year’s Eve, Swapna’s house is targeted.

Swapna very often plays the game, Pac-man and is kind of obsessed with bettering her high score. The game gives the player three life, the exhaustion of which leads to the game being over. We see this ‘three’ repeated throughout the movie. There are three masked intruders, three victims in the house, three times another character survived cancer and the number of tattoos on her forehand to commemorate that and the three lives Swapna gets after the ‘attack’ on her house has started. Which leads to the question, were there actually any intruders at all? Or did just Swapna imagine the whole thing and it was her way of fighting her inner demons?

The film is just over 100 minutes long and the fast pace makes it really hard to lose our focus at any point of the film. As a bonus, we are introduced to the psychological phenomena, ‘Anniversary effect’, as well as the use of VR technology as a therapy for PTSD.

Taapsee is brilliant and post Pink, she is on a roll! Is there any relation to on-screen jogging by Taapsee to the merit of the movie? She runs in Pink, Manmarzyaan and now in Game over. Did she run in Badla?