Che-Mystery Malayalam Movie
Chemistry is a real scary film. It gives you the creeps with its nerve wracking script, the threadbare story, the boring sound effects and the almost imaginary plot.
When three girls are found dead in a classroom, their boy friends are arrested by the local police, reason being that their snaps were found in the girls' mobile phone. The following academic year, things go topsy turvy as a fresher in the school (Saranya) puts up a spooky act, after becoming pally with one of the dead spirits.
The inspiration from real life incidents is obvious. Bu if you are expecting any further inquiry into it, you would only end up being distraught. It does tell you that mobile phones should be thrown out of the class rooms, but turns its face away from a drastic need for a change of attitude of a generation of young men and women. In short, the focus is pretty much on petty things, while huge chunks of more attention demanding material lie unattended to.
We could assume that a film like Chemistry have no intentions whatsoever to help us pull up our moral socks. The intention of the film should then be to cause a decent scare. After all it comes under the guise of a horror thriller. Which brings us to two important questions. Where is the horror? Where are the thrills?
What is it that still interests an audience about a possessed girl? Literally nothing, since over the ages, we have in our attempts to drive the spirit away, bound them to trees and tied them on to cots, set them on fire or beaten them to pulp. And on their part, we have seen them rake up a thunderstorm, or snarl their guts out, flash their sparkling white canines, spit blood or pop their eye balls out at us. Pretty exciting, but no thank you, our stomachs are very much full.
The location is conducive to horror. It's a girls' hostel where they have to walk along never ending corridors, climb up and down creaky steps, and where power gets cut off every now and then.
The very limited sack of tricks to make us jump in our seats falls flat this time. There is the banging of doors effect, the fleeing apparition effect, the burst-on-your-face effect, the flash light effect, the tip-toe effect and all the rest of the effects perfectly in place. But none of it works.
This film is a hollow exercise in frustration. The constant running around and screaming unfortunately doesn't make a good horror film. Neither does rolling of the eyes and panic attacks. I wish it at least had a whiff of mystery instead.
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