Connect review: This flick gives you a scary experience

The filmmaker plays with the havoc caused to a girl possessed by an evil spirit who walks into the girl's life.

Taking the Covid pandemic as the backdrop, the filmmaker plays with the havoc caused to a girl possessed by an evil spirit who walks into the girl’s life when she makes attempts to speak to her father-a Covid victim and warrior.

Dr Joseph (Vinay Rai) is happily married to Susan (Nayanthara).When he is holidaying on the beach sands of Vishakapatnam with his wife, his daughter Anna (Hanya Nafis) and pa-in-law Arthur Samuel (Satya Raj), he is summoned to the hospital to deal with the outbreak of corona virus. He also dies as a victim of the killer virus in its Initial days of conquest.

Susan and her daughter are shattered. Anna is lured into believing that she can communicate with her dead father. Caught in the lockdown at her home and the giant push onto the virtual world, she unwittingly invites a ghost home.

Susan and her dad Sammee, initially unaware, are shocked by strange happenings in the house. They are traumatized by the tragedy and now the ghost visitor. After some inelegant attempts to find an answer, they finally contact a specialist Exorcist (Anupam Kher). Now, given the national lockdown since he cannot arrive at the scene of the occurrence, the exorcism is on virtual mode. Predictably with success.

For once the film maker gets the timing right without an interval, the film runs its course in about 90 minutes. However, 90 minutes at a go gets tedious. Unfortunately ,the film maker makes 90 minutes look long and weary. The usual traps set for the ghosts are aplenty, rains and thunder, heavy winds and noisy windows, power failures and long dark nights, gravity defying movements, shrieks, and thuds.

As you move on with the ghosts, you manage to laugh aloud a couple of times. Scary never. This evil ghost fails to scare and is ready for submission at one single sitting with Anupam Kher. It perhaps knows it is well connected!

While Vinay Rai has nothing much to do, the rest do exactly that. Nayantara may be packaged as the female super star but surely fails to carry the film on her shoulders. Even the haunted child looks more tired than spirited. While Kher and Satyaraj are steady, they are props that are not sufficient to liven up the film.

However, director Ashwin Saravanan bites little but fails to chew even that. The premise is simple, the physical space is but a home and yet this short narrative gets tedious and not only because it deals with a ghost.