Game
    Over 

Slasher Trash with Panache?

Review:JA Kerswell

Forget two-and-a-half-hour running times and regular song-and-dance numbers; this Tamil language slasher thriller is taut and suspenseful. A young female games designer is haunted by a violent event from a year previously, and as the anniversary approaches, her anxiety increases. To make matters worse, she discovers a link to a murder victim that puts her in the sights of a vicious serial killer beheading young women in the local area. Although borrowing a mechanism from a then-contemporary North American slasher comedy, this film plays it straight, dealing with some pretty dark themes and conjuring up some major thrills in its final half hour.
 
Sapna (Taapsee Pannu)—who dresses in a Western style—is estranged from her family, who blame her for falling victim to a violent assault the previous New Year's Eve. They say the tattoo she got—a video game controller on her wrist—made her a target. Although the nature of the assualt isn’t made explictly clear, images have been widely shared on the internet that suggest that she had erroneously been indulging in a rape fantasy. Sapna shares her house on a gated community with her live-in maid Kalamma (Vinodhini Vaidynathan), who becomes increasingly concerned about Sapna’s declining mental health. Terrified of the dark, her psychiatrist tells her she is suffering an “anniversary reaction” and suggests she reconnect with her family.
 
Sapna’s anxiety is made worse by pain from the year-old tattoo, which seemingly defies explanation. Returning to the tattoo parlour, she discovers that it was done with ink intended for another client, who had mixed in the ashes of her murdered daughter (who had been killed by the serial killer plaguing the city). Increasingly distraught, she attempts suicide first by hanging herself and then jumping from the window of her psychiatrist’s building.
 
Sapna survives the fall, but is confined to a wheelchair. On the anniversary of her attack as the New Year approaches, her house is besieged by a skull-masked killer, and she discovers that she has three chances to outwit him and live through the night … 

In case you hadn’t guessed, GAME OVER borrows the plot mechanism of time resetting after each time Sapna is killed from Christopher Landon’s HAPPY DEATH DAY (2017). However, to dismiss GAME OVER as merely a clone would be unfair. Unlike earlier Indian language slasher movies such as WHISTLE, KUCCH TO HAI and DHUND: THE FOG (all 2003), it doesn’t have quite the same magpie tendencies. Those films would recreate scenes often shot-for-shot from popular North American slasher movies, albeit with the zany hyperactivity of Indian language film productions of that time. Here, the director simply utilises the time reset, but otherwise, the action is unique to this film. It feels organic, as it references the respawning, multiple lives typical in the video games that Sapna plays and designs. It turns out that the murder victim had survived cancer three times, which is the number of lives Sapna now has to cheat death.
GAME OVER arguably feels much more like a North American thriller shorn, as it is, of its song and dance numbers and epic running time, coming in at a relatively trim 102 minutes.

Admittedly, the film's structure may be off-putting for some. It starts with a grisly sequence where a young woman is filmed by a voyeur, before being decapitated and her body set on fire (with the killer kicking the severed head through some soccer goalposts in a darkly humorous moment). However, the next hour deals with Sapna’s struggles with her past trauma, the discovery that she accidentally has a tattoo containing the ashes of that murder victim, before becoming retraumatised all over again when the skull-faced killer targets her and her eventual chance at redemption. This confrontation takes the form of a home invasion that bears the influence of Mike Flanagan’s HUSH (2016). However, it is so well-constructed and shot that it is something of a masterclass in suspense, and it includes a neat twist that I’ll let the viewer discover. Arguably, director Ashwin Saravanan could have taken another cue from Landon’s film and made this sequence a more prominent part of the film, as the respawning narrative would have allowed.
 
GAME OVER was released in three languages—Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. It garnered praise from critics for its storytelling and Pannu's performance in the lead role. India Today called it a “kickass psychological thriller.” It was a minor hit with domestic audiences.
 
Regardless, whilst the film didn’t quite share the financial success of Landon’s film (and thus didn’t trigger a sequel), it is a remarkably well-made movie with a gripping final half hour, sure to thrill any slasher fan. 

BODY COUNT 13: 
Female 5 / Male 8

1. Female is suffocated, beheaded and set on fire
2. Female seen decapitated
3. Female decapitated with a machete (off screen)
4. Male is seen dead
5. Female is stabbed in the back with a machete
6. Male is shot dead
7. Male is killed in an explosion
8. Female is killed in an explosion
9. Male​ is burnt to death
10. Male is killed with a machete (off screen)
11. Male is killed with a machete (off screen)
12. Male is beaten to death with foot rest of wheelchair
13. Female is stabbed in the neck with a shard of glass

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