A film set in a single room is always fascinating like ’12 Angry Men’ and more recently ‘Circle’. ‘Dhayam’ is touted as the first Tamil movie of the genre and let us take a look if it gets one hooked.

Three women and four men are called up for an interview for the post of a CEO of a company. The interviewer informs the group that the person who held the post previously had committed suicide by hanging in the same room and had written a letter that whoever aspires for the post will be killed. He also tells them that the doors be shut and will open only after one hour and whoever survives will be chosen. What happens next meanders into a horror, thriller and MPD screenplay that begins engagingly and peters out in the second half.

The film has mostly newcomers with Santhosh Pratap the main lead hamming it up like nobody’s business. Jayakumar, Jiiva Ravi and ‘Kadhal’ Kannan are the known faces who match the newcomers with their expressions. The girls, Aira Agarwal, Anmol Sandhu and Sahana give the impression that they cannot act even if their lives depended on it.

The art director Vinod Rajkumar has dressed up an interesting single room set while cameraman Packiaraj has captured it neatly and editor Sudarshan lets the story flow with a fairly brisk pace in the first half. The songs and bgm by Sathish Selvam are ok for the genre. Director Kannan Rangaswamy has tried to mix ‘Exam’, ‘Fermat’s Room’ and ‘Identity and give it as one to the Tamil audiences. However undue twists and turns between genres coupled with some rank bad acting do not help his cause.

Verdict : Go for it if you fancy a few thrilling moments and do not care too much about acting expertise, befuddling genre jumps and lip sync issues.