Leading South Indian actress Nayanthara's next big film Connect is hitting theatres on December 22 and has been directed by Ashwin Saravanan of Maya and Game Over fame. Produced by Vignesh Shivan under the Rowdy Pictures banner, the upcoming intense horror thriller is a special Christmas treat for fans and is set in the first lockdown period in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. With the Connect trailer released recently and the buzz for the film highly positive so far, Ashwin Saravanan recently sat down for a candid conversation with National Award-winning film critic Baradwaj Rangan, the Editor-in-Chief of Galatta Plus, to talk about how the film came to be, while also delving into its theme.
Ashwin Saravanan said, "Ashwin Saravanan said, "Like everybody, I was stuck at home and feeling hopeless that I'm not going to be able to make films or even be alive in a couple of months. I was anxious for my parents and I could not think past the void that was there in all our lives. In some way, I wanted to process all those emotions in a film and wanted to express that, and thought the best genre to do that was horror. So, how do you capture the horror of a lockdown experience? I didn't want to do it as a drama. I wanted to kind of set a horror film in lockdown and see how far the stakes can be raised. I was researching another film and surprisingly there was a footnote in a book that I was reading which mentioned about a pries t resorting to performing exorcism through a skype call if he's too old to travel or incapacitated. The book was written 20 years back and suddenly when I was reading it I began thinking that this is more relevant to me now than it would have been years ago. So, what if someone gets possessed during the lockdown, and what if the priest is not able to come and help? Immediately, we can do it virtually. The prospect of doing the exorcism virtually suddenly opened up the whole film for me and that was the third act, which wrote itself. The one thing I want to underline here is that the story is not groundbreaking or it's never been done before. I don't want to say those things because when you're working in the genre space, whatever sub-genre you're making, this being demonic possession/exorcism, there are classics out there. Even in Tamil, Milind Rau made Aval, which is about exorcism and what happens to this girl. But, what's interesting to me is setting it in the context of the lockdown where members of a family are in different places and they're not able to connect with each other and this prospect of being isolated and how this mother is left to kind of save her daughter and what happens there, how the family comes together. and fights this and finds hope and recovers together. For me, this was more of a family story and that's what made the film interesting for me. If I'm not having that emotional angle for a high concept, then I'll not make this film. Even though the idea is enticing, it is not enough for me to tell a story for 90 minutes or two hours, so to speak. So, I want an emotional angle, I want character arcs for me to be interested in those characters because if I'm not invested in them, the horror won't work for me. The more you work for the characters, the scarier the film becomes.""
Watch Ashwin Saravanan in conversation with Baradwaj Rangan below:
