Here I go again, diving into a slice of cinema from an area I am not too familiar with (this time it's a horror film from India). That's never stopped me before though, and it won't stop me in the future. The only way you get more knowledgeable about cinema from different countries, different genres, or different eras, is to keep making time in your schedule to watch them. I may find reviewing such movies a bit more daunting, but maybe I won't feel that way one day. Or maybe I'll always feel that way, but I'll be happy to roll up my sleeves and try my best anyway.
The story here is fairly simple, at least for the first half of the film. After being told a folk tale about a father losing two sons, having the chance to have one returned to him, and the 2 idols that are crucial to this situation, viewers end up joining a group of people who are investigating a supposedly haunted mansion. It doesn't take long to realise that the haunting is very real, and everyone seems doomed to disappear. There's a bit more to it all though, and viewers are then taken back a few hours to watch exactly how everyone ended up in such dire straits.
Written and directed by Tarun Teja, expanding their 2020 short into this debut feature, Asvins is a fantastically creepy and well-made horror movie that falls apart in a third act that goes for the standard approach of having a lead character trying to unlock various clues that they hope may lead to some kind of escape from the clutches of evil entities. As other characters are moved offscreen, we're left with just one person to figure everything out, which they do by looking around them while their inner monologue plays over the soundtrack. Despite my limited exposure to the rich and varied tapestry of cinema from India, the inner monologue feels like quite a common trope, but it's unfortunately irritating here when it becomes the main source of exposition for almost the entirety of the third act.
Vasanth Ravi and Saraswathi Menon are two of the leads, playing a husband and wife named Arjun and Ritu, and they're accompanied by the younger Rahul, played by Udhayadeep, and Rahul's older brother, Varun, played by Muralidaran. There's also Grace, played by Malina, completing the main quintet. Everyone does a decent job, although Ravi suffers from the fact that he's sometimes involved in a number of moments that seem to take a step away from the building horror, and they all do well at acting convincingly terrified when faced with something that is out to terrify them.
Teja puts together some superb scares throughout the first half of the movie, even if some of them are easy jump scares. It's all reminiscent of some top notch J-horror content (an approaching figure with long black hair, tech that starts to fail in a way that makes you think someone/thing else is controlling it, the backstory that viewers suspect is due to be explored during the finale), but it's unsustainable for the 111-minute runtime. What should be a barnstorming conclusion instead ends up turning into a hard-going slog through to the end credits.
I'd still recommend this to horror fans who are after something that might be completely new to them, and I hope to see more from Teja in this vein, but I'd put the odds at 50/50 on whether you end up liking it or not.
6/10
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