‘Sabdham’ movie review: Aadhi-Arivazhagan’s reunion has an intriguing premise but misses the right notes

A still from ‘Sabdham’ 
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

What distinguishes music and noise is a thin line. It also seems to be the case between service and business for those with healthcare needs. The former involves soundwaves while the latter can be implied with a heartbeat waveform and in both cases, the lines cannot afford to go flat. After setting a benchmark for horror films in Tamil cinema with Eeram (2009), director Arivazhagan and actor Aadhi Pinisetty are back with Sabdham. The film tries to walk a tightrope between being an intriguing horror and an exposition-heavy primer on several topics, only to fall flat.

In Sabdham, Aadhi plays Ruben, a paranormal investigator, who has been tasked with the job of getting to the bottom of unexplainable mysteries in a reputed college where a slew of students have died by suicide. After befriending an internal lecturer Avantika (Lakshmi Menon) who has her share of nightmares and getting remote help from Deepak (Vivek Prasanna), a fellow investigator, Aadhi has to solve a decades-old case which will uphold goodness and give evil the punishment it deserves.

Apart from Eeram being the actor and the director’s previous collaboration, a few more common aspects with Sabdham make it difficult to avoid comparisons. While Aadhi played a cop in Eeram, in both films, he’s given the tough job of investigating and digging up the facts; in a way, Sabdham is a procedural. While Aadhi’s cop character has a personal connection to the case he attends in Eeram, Ruben, when he discovers music to be the core idea of the case he’s handling, shares how it was also once a part of his traumatic childhood. Despite such similarities —and with Thaman composing music for both films—they can’t be more different given their treatments.

Sabdham’s major problem lies in not figuring out its core audience and in an attempt to be open for all, the film squanders its potential. For every thrilling moment the film presents, there are sequences explaining everything from what a full spectrum camera to an EMF meter, thermal cameras and audio hallucinations are. There’s even a sequence where Ruben explains what a frequency is. In an attempt to make the film grounded, Sabdham concentrates more on offering explanations rather than providing the thrills.

Split into chapters, Sabdham starts off quite interestingly, with even a reference to the real-life paranormal investigator Gaurav Tiwari. When the film moves from Aadhi’s adventures in Mumbai to Munnar, Sabdham becomes yet another film set on an eerie hilltop. My biggest grouse with the film is its attempts at scaring us; a lone, badly created VFX bat randomly flies across the screen, a student dresses up as a ghost and fails to scare both Ruben and us, and a ghost pulls off a jumpscare, only for it to be paused so that we can learn that it’s a shot from a video game. The scares employed in Sabdham are a far cry from how the filmmaker used the life-giving elixir and core element of nature, water, as a vessel for revenge for a prejudiced good spirit in Eeram.

Instead, in an attempt to make the film a bit more commercial, we have to endure Arokiyam’s (Redin Kingsley) attempts at humour that is anything but healthy. In a scene, he attempts to establish the gender of the ghost as male because who else would want to haunt a ladies’ hostel? I wish I was making this up. When we are not subjected to bad jokes, we get bad, VFX-powered scares. A dead body keeps going through unexplainable, abnormal physical transformation and when the room is devoid of the living bodies, the camera holds its attention on the dead body for a moment too much. If you did not know that it’s going to twitch, or not guess the fate of someone who says something along the lines of “over my dead body”, you might just be the target audience for Sabdham. The dialogues too don’t come in handy as we are subjected to lines like “Idhu thedra vishayam illa, unarura vishayam” (this is not to be found, it’s to be felt).

A still from ‘Sabdham’ 
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

What comes as a solace is the character graph of Aadhi’s Ruben. As someone with an off-beat profession, Aadhi looks the part of a man who knows things many don’t even have the heart to believe. There are multiple instances where Ruben bumps into people who take the tone of conversing with a scammer and Aadhi brushes them off with a peaceful smile leaving us wishing the film concentrated on these aspects more. I personally liked how Ruben’s character acts as a medium between two realms and not a one-stop shop for exorcising those in need. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is underwhelming, or given very little to do. Lakshmi Menon’s pre-intermission scene featuring her character tied to a chair is sure to remind you of something similar from Chandramukhi 2.

The heroes of Sabdham are its technical crew, especially the sound design team. Half the experience of enjoying a horror or a thriller film has to do with its sounds, and even though Sabdham comes up short with its visuals, it delivers on the sonic front. To think of it, it gets a tad meta considering the film’s core connection to sounds. Thaman might not give us an equivalent of the soul-soothing ‘Mazhaiye Mazhaiye’ but does a fine job with the score. The cursory flashback introduces us to characters played by veterans Simran and Laila. While there isn’t much to tell about their characters, without getting into the spoiler category, it’s safe to say that the actions of Laila’s character towards the one played by Simran feel like retaliation to what Simran’s character did to Laila in Parthen Rasithen 25 years ago. What goes around comes around!

Sabdham had what it takes to be a fitting crime horror flick which could have paved the way to see more of Ruben’s adventures, similar to Ed and Lorraine Warren’s Conjuring Universe. The film, instead, tries and fails to establish an emotional connection with its third act involving kids and a Mother Teresa-esque character… and a shot right from the astral projection scene from Doctor Strange which obviously does not evoke the reaction it’s supposed to. In an attempt to be safe and sound with its concept, Sabdham misses the high notes it requires to work, making us a mute spectator of director Arivazhagan’s most underwhelming feature film outing yet.

Sabdham is currently running in theatres