‘Connect’ movie review: Quite pedestrian by Ashwin Saravanan’s standards

Starring Nayanthara in the lead, ‘Connect’ can get really scary at times. But you feel a disconnect when you realise that ‘Connect’ is a movie that places its trust on the theatrics of the genre and not on emotion

In the midst of crashing sounds of the waves comes a breezy hum of a teenage girl. She sings ‘Naan Varaigira Vaanam’:

Meen kannadi thottikul thedum oar kadale vazhva? (A fish searching for the ocean inside an aquarium…is that life?)

Then comes this beautiful line: Nagargira nadhigal dhane kadalai thodum kanne kanne (A river that moves on is the one that meets the sea); virindhirum siragugal vinnai thodum nenje nenje (A bird that spreads its wings reaches the sky). 

Weren’t we all like fish inside the aquarium searching for life during the pandemic-induced lockdowns? Isn’t this song about humanity, that kept us all going, when hope was lost at the onslaught of COVID-19? All of this seems like a distant past. But we are not over yet. And these two lines by Kadhirmozhi Sudha help us guess the soul of this movie.

The “meen” of Connect is Anna Joseph (Haniya Nafisa). She gets an opportunity to pursue her passion for music from Trinity College of Music, London. Anna’s mother Susan (Nayanthara) is against it and glares at the grandfather, Arthur Samuel (Sathyaraj), to be on her team. The person who asks Anna to grow wings is her father, Joseph Benoy (Vinay Rai).

Joseph is a doctor who is on COVID duty. He does not, however, miss to video call Anna and Susan no matter how hectic his day is at the hospital. Ashwin cuts to the chase in the initial portions. The scene cuts and we see Joseph lying on the bed with an oxygen mask on. Joseph dies, just like countless COVID warriors who sacrificed their lives for us to breathe. Grieving over the loss of her father, Anna Joseph tries to communicate with him through the ouija board, when she invites an uninvited guest. This is when the title card appears, at the 20-minute mark.

Very few movies set against the backdrop of COVID-19 have come close to capturing the restlessness and uncertainty we have felt over the last couple of years. Filmmaker Ashwin Saravanan and writer Kavya Ramkumar are smart enough to design Connect in the thick of the pandemic as a means to take us through the time we all felt suffocated and claustrophobic, living our lives inside the four corners of a smartphone camera. This is the most horrifying part of Connect; the fact that the camera’s gaze is the front-facing camera of a smartphone for the most part.