Ashwin Saravanan’s Connect (co-written with Kaavya Ramkumar) is set during the pandemic — a horror film unravelling at a time when reality was already full of it, and people struggled to connect with their loved ones. The whole world learned to conduct its business over Zoom calls, from online school to international conferences, and weddings. So, why not an exorcism?
The film opens with an idyllic scene at Mahabalipuram beach. Susan (Nayanthara), her husband Joseph (Vinay Rai), their daughter Anna (Haniya Nafisa) and Susan’s father Arthur (Sathyaraj) are enjoying a peaceful day. Joseph, who is a doctor, receives an urgent call from his hospital, and from then on, the story unravels through Zoom calls that freeze at frustrating points. The time when we viewed the world through a pretty lens is over and the horror is about to begin.
The premise of the film is simple — Anna becomes possessed during the lockdown and it falls upon Susan to rescue her from the clutches of evil. At a taut 98 minutes (the film doesn’t have an interval), Connect depends heavily upon its visual effects, background score (Prithvi Chandrasekhar) and the spooky atmospherics generated by the lighting and camera angles to unsettle the audience.
Staring at what’s in the background of other people’s screens was a favourite pastime during those days of endless Zoom calls, and Connect has many such instances. Except, what the characters see isn’t someone’s pet dog or absent-minded uncle, but something quite blood-curdling.
The events unfold at rapid speed. Joseph is stuck in the hospital, and he attempts to express the tragedy that he sees around him every day. The dubbing for the character, however, is in a stilted Tamil that makes the scenes less effective. It’s also strange that when he gets the call from the hospital, he seems clueless about what this virus could possibly be. By the time the virus reached India in early 2020, China was already reeling under its impact and the Indian medical community certainly knew that the nightmare would begin for them soon. Joseph’s casual, “Edho oru virusaam” (It’s some virus, they’re saying), therefore, strikes one as ignorant for a doctor.
Beyond that opening scene on the beach, there’s nothing we know about these people, and this comes in the way of forming a connect with them. Nayanthara shudders and weeps through her bleak circumstances, but her Susan spends her days in the lockdown (even when she tests positive) in classy sarees — this was when most of us were living in our PJs. Susan’s appearance, in full make-up and well-dressed all the time, is incongruous with the world at large and particularly her circumstances.
Anna’s character, too, suffers from generic writing. In Ashwin’s previous film Game Over (2019), Swapna (Taapsee) spends most of her time cooped up at home with her domestic help for company. She’s suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and must vanquish her inner demons before she can step out. But there’s also some background to who Swapna is and what happened to her. We care about her making it alive through the experience. In Connect, the demons are real, but we remain distant from what’s happening because the characters don’t come alive. Sathyaraj plays a god-fearing grandfather, but surprisingly for an actor of his calibre, there’s something off about his performance too.
In fact, it is Susan’s sister who leaves an impression, despite her limited screen time. And that’s because she isn’t just gasping at the screen all the time — she is doing the laundry, her kid is getting on her nerves, and she’s at the end of her tether with just the sheer exhaustion of all that she has to deal with. Susan, in contrast, never seems like an actual person who’s been air dropped into such a stressful situation.
Connect uses many old-fashioned tropes that we’ve seen in supernatural Christian horror flicks, and the jump scares are certainly startling. But when scene after scene relentlessly shoves jump scares in your face, there is no suspense. You’re already expecting to be frightened, and so the moment passes by. The screenplay has no breathing space for the fear to build within the characters, and consequently, in the viewer.
Anupam Kher plays a senior priest who’s called in to perform the exorcism. It’s bewildering why he’s speaking in English and there’s a voice-over in Tamil drowning out his lines. The dissonance would have been all right for a couple of lines, but this goes on for a while and dilutes the gravity of a crucial scene.
The idea of telling the story through screens veers towards gimmicky when the characters never seem to get off their Zoom calls to handle the heavy-duty challenges that life is throwing at them. Unlike horror films like Host where everything happens over a single online session, the calls in Connect go on and on and you experience Zoom fatigue even if you aren’t sitting before a laptop.
The main events in Connect take place over 14 days, the quarantine period advised for those infected. The film appears to draw a parallel between the virus and the possession — it’s an interesting comparison but the script doesn’t do much with it.
Connect has some good ideas and scares, but it doesn’t really get your pulse rate up after a point. More is the pity.
Sowmya Rajendran writes on gender, culture, and cinema. She has written over 25 books, including a nonfiction book on gender for adolescents. She was awarded the Sahitya Akademi’s Bal Sahitya Puraskar for her novel Mayil Will Not Be Quiet in 2015.
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.