Athu Review

Suddenly, horror is the flavor of the season in filmdom. You have Ram Gopal Varma's Factory churning out flicks after flicks that are about ghosts, spirits and other scary things. In Tamil itself you had Shock. 

Adhu, at core, is about the struggles of a blind played by Sneha encountering a spirit after she undergoes eye transplantation --- courtesy a young woman raped and murdered. Though the film has frames evoking horror, courtesy Selvakumar's cinematography and Yuvan Shankar Raja's re-recording, most of the scenes aimed at scaring you, seem very familiar.

The movie begins with a blind woman Sneha undergoing eye-transplantation surgery. Once she gets back her vision, she encounters super natural forces and comes across a vivid image of a young woman. She consults a psychiatrist, played by a debutant Aravindh, and eventually falls in love with him.

Initially everybody laughs at her and dismisses her statements as a hallucination. Later they realize it to be the handiwork of a young woman's spirit and go to the village (Vijayanagar), where the young woman lived and died. They realize from the villagers that the young woman had ESP (Extra Sensory Perception) and predicted future happenings in advance. But the villagers mistake her to be a witch and drive her out of the village. Meanwhile, an industrialist (Kazan Khan) comes to the village and sets up a factory promising jobs for the villagers.

The young woman takes the cudgels against Kazan Khan as she realizes that he is in village only to make money at the expense of the people's safety. But Kazan Khan with the help of the village chieftain Vijayan convinces people that the young woman is an evil force and the villagers eventually stone her to death. But a good doctor in the village (Abbas) arranges for a decent funeral and donates her eyes as per her last wish --- this eye gets transplanted to Sneha. Coming to know about this entire story, Sneha embarks on a mission to educate the villagers and takes on Kazan Khan.

The rest is about how the young woman's spirit gets into Sneha and takes revenge the evil men. This film is out and out Sneha's. This is perhaps her best performance till date. She is particularly superb while looking the part of the woman taken over by a spirit.

Abbas is quiet in his cameo while new comer Aravindh has nothing much to do.

Music by Yuvan Shankar Raja adds strength to the movie. A horror movie with scary frames needs a perfect backing from the music-director and Yuvan has provided just that. Debutanat director Ramesh Krishnan deserves credit for churning out a slick movie on his debut.  However, he could have kept the momentum going with more surprises.

Spirit is there. But the other spirit is slightly missing.