‘Aghathiyaa’ movie review: Jiiva, Arjun turn Siddha medicine marketeers in Pa Vijay’s dreadful horror-drama

While stepping into films like Aghathiyaa, you need to set your expectations right, something the promo material of the Pa Vijay-directorial fails to do. So when the film opens with a drone shot swooping us into a palatial bungalow replete with translucent ghosts and a Piano-playing French woman whose head can turn 360 degrees, you might have to recalibrate your expectations from a usual horror-comedy to an old-school and corny horror drama. Even then, you might get it wrong; one really cannot fathom what Vijay has in store for us in Aghathiyaa.

We learn that the bungalow is an old abandoned palace in Pondicherry that a newcomer Art Director, Aghathiyan (Jiiva), is renovating for his debut feature film. Because it’s his debut film and the producer is a nuisance, Aghathiyan had invested Rs 30 lakhs of his own money in making the set. Unexpectedly, the film’s shoot gets stalled (because the heroine eloped with the director on their way to the shooting spot! I wish I was joking). Now, in a desperate attempt to get back his money, Aghathiyan, his girlfriend Veena (Raashii Khanna), and their friends convert the structure into a ticketed haunted attraction called Scary House. The venture picks up well, thanks to Pondicherry’s year-round tourism. However, as expected, real supernatural elements wreak havoc.

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

You wish that’s all the film had to say, but no. Director Pa Vijay’s film is a wild concoction of the most random ideas somehow brought together as a horror-comedy. Antiques in the bungalow inform Aghathiyan of an incident that had transpired in the 1940s involving a despicable Frenchman named Edwin Duplex (Edward Sonnenblick, in another typical evil White man role) and his physically challenged sister, Jacqueline Poovizhi (Matylda). Add to the mix an arc about a Siddhar (meaning an ancient Tamil saint) who saved a still-born Aghathiyan, other godly beings who appear and disappear, ancient Egyptian rituals, a mythical Piano, and a rare celestial occurrence, and we have a god-awful mess of a film that somehow features stars like Jiiva and Arjun.

At its best, Aghathiyaa is campy fun. The mixture, however nonsensical, is so heady that you are somehow hooked, waiting for the next outrageous idea to leave you in disbelief. What would you do if you discovered a skeleton in an abandoned building you just took over? Even if, say, you had to protect your business from the fallout of the finding, wouldn’t you try to dispose of it? In either case, it would warrant a discussion. Here, Aghathiyan simply adds it as a prop to their Scary House, and no, this isn’t done for humour’s sake. It’s just how it is. What would you do if you saw a ghost for the first time? Veena and Aghathiyan go about it as if ghosts are only as rare as finding an antique piano. The film hardly cares to make the supernatural aspects appear scary (‘extraterrestrial’ is used in place of ‘supernatural’ in an instance, and that says enough).

There are some CGI-heavy scenes that no other mainstream creator would dare pitch in modern-day cinema — like an AI-assisted Doctor Strange-inspired showdown with a mind-bending superhero-power-up scene. You find no effort to make the graphics and the sets seem real. Sure, you can justify the tackiness of the bungalow since the story necessitates it to look like a horror-themed house; yet, the bungalow appears even more set-like in the flashback when it was as it is. A particular stretch surrounding a makeshift Siddha hospital appears particularly shoddy.

At its worst, Aghathiyaa is a dreary commercial on the forgotten legacy of the Siddha school of medicine and whatever pseudoscience creative liberty allows you to pass off as Siddha. The film stars Arjun as a Siddha doctor in the ‘40s, named Dr. Siddharthan, who vows to bring back the glory of ancient Indian medicine. Siddharthan claims his Siddha formula can cure bone cancer, and this leads to the real conflict of the film: Aghathiyan’s mother (Rohini) is suffering from bone cancer, and so not even an evil dictator’s demonic spirit would dissuade Aghathiyan from locating Siddharthan’s formula.

Arjun in a still from ‘Aghathiyaa’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

It’s confounding how often the film tries to become a serious drama and fails. Every now and then, Vijay chirps in with a political statement or two. It’s only ironic that a film that briefly features the Dravidian newspapers of the ‘40s, the revolutionary poet Bharathidasan, and portrayals of Brahmanical oppression (a Brahmin even says, ‘A progressive Leftist seems more dangerous than the White oppressor’), criticises the Dravidian governments’ freebies policies while also batting so heavily for the ‘forgotten glory of ancient medicines.’

Look, perhaps there’s a Siddha medicine that can somehow help patients with bone cancer, but never mistake Aghathiyaa as an attempt that cares about educating you on Siddha. The film’s intent to do so is superficial at best. Guess what the name of the doctor treating Aghathiyan’s mother or the saintly figure that saved him when he was born is? Vaideeshwari (translating to Goddess of Medicine and Healing). Gimmicky, much? This is all Vijay cares about — to repackage a WhatsApp forward on Siddha medicine in the form of a mainstream horror film.

If anything, the film’s advocacy does nothing to the general perception of many non-allopathic schools of medicine — that they are largely untested remedies that are hyperbolized as cures to the diseases for which Western medicine has yet to discover a cure. In a film that seems to stand with progressive Dravidian ideologies, you expect some scientific temper. In one instance, Siddhartha wields an ancient medicinal root to deter an elephant charging at him…

But what else could you expect in a film that resolves its knots with low-hanging fruits of solutions, like a sudden divine intervention? If only something divine saved the film or at least dissuaded the makers from remixing an iconic track like Ilaiyaraaja’s ‘En Iniya Pon Nilaave’.

Aghathiyaa is currently running in theatres