Game Over: A genre-bending thriller story about a gamer’s battle with inner demons
How often do you come across a subject matter that is so ambiguous yet, intriguing, interesting, and inspiring? After showing whiff of great storytelling and film making with Maaya, Ashwin Saravanan comes again with yet another immersive dark thriller, Game Over, that features Tapsee in the lead role.
The movie starts with the brutal murder of a young girl Amudha by an anonymous, masked killer. The story is then cut to Swapna’s life who is an avid gamer ,leading a life with a condition post-traumatic disorder and is battling with her Anniversary Reaction condition. She is supported by a domestic help Kalamma , who also happens to be her emotional anchor. Her condition turns serious and lethal when she starts experiencing a burning sensation on her wrist that is inked with a gaming tattoo. The rest of the story is how she battles with her psychological conditions and emerges victorious?
Game Over is not your usual run of the mill thriller that is boxed into a specific genre but it is an experimental genre-bending thriller that serves a variety of plot devices, tropes, themes, sub-genres onto the table, and the way Ashwin weaved all this is commendable. While it might appear like a home invasion slasher thriller on the exterior, it is layered and is vocal about many aspects of the story. It speaks about psychological conditions like PSTD, Nyctophobia, Anniversary reaction, that protagonist is undergoing and the trauma she is bearing due to it. And the movie shows a time-loop sequence where Swapna is locked into her inner demons, in the final act of the story.
Swapna’s obsessive hobby of video game stands as a metaphor for her mental state where she has more than one yet limited chance of fighting with her inner demons, in the form of killers. The tattoo inked with Amudha’s cremated ashes also hints a supernatural angle to the story, speculating Amudha preventing Swapna from committing suicide and helping her win the inner demons the way she battled with her cancer. Also, the story also tells about the phenomenon of dejavu, a quote on the wallpaper which suggests that Life is a video game and dejavus are checkpoints, another analogy that Swapna is imagining the presence of killers in her dream and the victory in the battle occurs in reality.
Game Over is a game-changer, in terms of storytelling and multi-aspect storytelling. Made on a moderate budget, in a limited premise, the movie is visually aesthetic, evoking a bleak and sinister atmosphere, that the story is equipped for. The sound design and BGM elevate the storytelling to another level.
