Game Over starring Taapsee Pannu and Vinodhini Vaidyanathan is a film that cannot be boxed into one genre — psycho-drama, thriller, a ghost story, a video game, a dream, or a possibly real story. Critics love not being able to hit the nail on the coffin; it is also what will make the film unforgettable. I liked Game Over particularly because it’s a rare film that can be used to teach a Writing Women 101 course, and much of that comes, I can vouch, from having a female writer Kaavya Ramkumar in this case who co-wrote the film with director Ashwin Saravanan.
There’s immaculate research but no preaching. The film introduces us to two new concepts ‘anniversary reaction’ and ‘memorial tattoos’ but there is no showing off. The detailing and the development of the screenplay centre the women of the story. In short, the movie is about the aftermath of sexual violence with a serial killer sub-plot. There is the ‘before’ in black and white flashes, not in a block flashback sequence, very much like in real life. In the ‘before’ Swapna (Taapsee Pannu) seems like an extrovert. She’s independent, dresses up to go out, and has people to go out with. In the after, we see her. Take a minute to fully absorb that. Maybe for the first time, sexual violence is placed in a screenplay neither to further the hero’s goodness nor harden the heroine’s need for revenge. It is instead the real deal — it has happened, and now the person (victim/survivor depending on how one sees them) has to process it.
The parents tell her she could’ve avoided it by not going out. She could’ve, but can’t avoid what has happened now. Kalamma (Vinodhini Vaidyanathan) is the house caretaker and caregiver who has a relationship I’m curious to know the roots of. She says Swapna must move on now that the perpetrator is in jail. “Is there any point?” Swapna asks, and continues to talk about her trauma, fear of darkness, anxiety attacks, suicidal thoughts, isolation, lack of sleep and appetite, how her life has changed forever, and him being in jail doesn’t matter. His horrible death doesn’t either, but a film so focussed on Swapna needn’t ever script that in.
The little things, if one spots it, build the larger picture. It’s in the clothes, in the security measures, the home she builds for herself, the distance she puts between her former and present life, how she chooses to not be around people, in changing her mobile number, in feeling watched, in turning the ‘smoking independent woman’ stereotype to front a woman left unsure in her being and uncomfortable in her body, and in the magnitude of her anxiety. We don’t ever see Swapna’s parents or friends, this is not because of the movie’s casting budget, but because there are only so few people Swapna wishes to see. She is in therapy, no explanation offered, I love. She took Kalamma along, and the popular guess is ‘their bond’; mine is that Swapna many a time fears things and travelling alone could be one of them.
We don’t know what really happened, and we don’t need to. We never need to know why someone did it, and I’m so very glad that there was no sob story for what made the perpetrator who he becomes. There’s lot’s of love, a large sisterhood, and the women we see have no pity for themselves or each other. It’s their story, told from their point of view. There is a card that keeps popping up in shots. It’s the first a mother wrote to her daughter when she was diagnosed with cancer. It reads ‘We all have two lives. The second one starts when we realise that we only have one.’ Beneath it, is another phrase but one that only someone familiar with it can piece together — ‘Fight like a woman’.
And I tried. While watching the movie and after. Game Over left me overwhelmed, but before I had a chance to take in the good stuff, I was triggered by the many things happening on screen. I came out of the theatre breathless, had my own panic attack, bawled in public, couldn’t get myself to go home alone, and haven’t been able to sleep or eat properly, nor put myself in crowded places or groups since I watched it three days ago.
A film is unlike a newspaper, you don’t go to it knowing its bad news. So when the news is unexpectedly close to home, and so very real, so like you that it could be you, we call a movie like Game Over a ‘game-changer’ for hitting a relatable, real, easy to access but rarely used chord with so much finesse — all in terms of women’s stories, by women. But it means we need to play this game differently hereon with Trigger Warnings. Game Over to the archaic cinema is a good thing to happen.
archanaa seker
seker.archanaa@gmail.com
The writer is a city-based activist, in-your-face feminist and a media glutton