When my friend invited me to see this horror movie Aaaah (ஆ…) that too for a night show, I naturally hesitated. The reasons were two. First is that I am not a fan of Horror movies, I don’t believe in paying money to get scared, and having said that I do like good Ghost movies like The Sixth Sense (1999) by Night Shyamalan. The second reason was when I asked my friend what the movie was about, he said its Tamil’s first horror anthology film, and I didn’t know what was an anthology. Googling the word, I learnt that an anthology was a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. True to this when I saw the movie yesterday, I understood it. The movie was a collection of 4 episodes, all connected by a common thread.
The story was about 3 friends Thamizh (played by Gokulnath), Cherry (played by Meghna) and Singaram (Bala Saravanan) making a bet with their common nemesis Prosper (played by Bobby Simha). The bet was to prove the existence of Ghosts and win Rs.60 Crores. In this quest they go around the world, chasing after Ghosts sighting stories everywhere. Their journey takes them to deep-sea in the Bay of Bengal, to Tokyo (Japan), the deserts of Dubai (UAE) and dark forest lands near Chennai. The first episode, to the deep-sea, starts off well and when we were expecting interesting things to come, it just ends.
The overall premise of the movie is interesting, the weak link was the individual episodes. Not one of the four stories makes an impact on us, including the killing of Cherry’s fiancee and his friends in the end. There is no logical (of course it is our mistake to expect one in a ghost movie) explanation in any of the stories, and we are not sure why how they plan to prove their quest. At one point, when we are shown a movie within a movie (from the DVD purchased by Cherry’s fiancee and played in their car video player), that too in a flashback mode which itself was a video in the fiancee’s phone, our head gets twisted and cross knotted. In the end, when I was expecting to be shown that all the bad things happen due to the handiwork of Prosper, we are shown something else which for me felt cold.
I liked the performance of Bosskey and M.R.Bhaskar, both of whom have done their limited roles well. There is not much for Bobby Simha to do other than to hold a glass in his hands all the while. My rating will be 2.5/5.
Aaaah (2014)