Game Over: A thriller that captures the constant fear women live with

Swapna (a terrific Taapsee Pannu), a video-game developer, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder after being attacked on New Year’s eve. She was tied up, stripped naked, and recorded while she pleaded for help. Living with her help at Gurugram, she works from home and spends most of her time in front of the screen playing Pac-man: her struggle to evade the ghost in the virtual world mirrors her reality of wrestling with past demons while tentatively holding on to the present. Darkness petrifies her. It not only reminds her of what had happened but convinces her of a cruel reiteration. There is a guard stationed outside her door, a camera inside enabling her to monitor who comes to her place and when. With a year to be completed since the incident, she is afflicted with ‘anniversary reactions’, paranoid it will happen again. It is not entirely unfounded. An unidentified person is beheading women and setting them ablaze. And an hour before the clock is about to strike 12, she can sense she will be the next victim.

Saravanan’s genre-bending film works fine as a home-invasion thriller, even as a psychological drama, but it is most effective as a commentary on the distinct shade of fear that women living alone or even otherwise, are all too familiar with — of being seen without seeing, of knowing no space is safe and, so is no one. After the horrific incident, Swapna recollects being told by her father that staying at home that night could have prevented things from unfolding the way they did. The film ingeniously thwarts this claim by opening with a graphic scene of a girl being attacked while she was within the safe confines of her house.

By presenting Swapna’s panic as a result of the attack on her, Saravanan lends context to it, but by making her live with it, while imposing a sort of self-exile on herself, battle against a phantom-like dread that bears no face — even after the person concerned is imprisoned — he is not just foregrounding how such incidents leave an indelible imprint on the survivors but making a larger point: for women, fear decides for them rather than them deciding for themselves. It convinces them to avoid a dark alley or adjust their pace when they hear footsteps behind.

This pervasive and oppressing presence of the unwarranted male gaze on women, so often internalised, has rendered it omnipresent; it is interred in their bones even though the cause might differ. The director craftily underlines this by desisting from revealing anything about the perpetrators. Withholding their identity and objective, he imparts just the sense of foreboding their presence creates and their shared fetish of recording women while torturing them. He does so since the specificities in this case, simply do not matter. These faceless assailants — with their propensity to keep proliferating and coming back in an automated, illusionary way — stand as a mere allegory of the potential peril women are unendingly subjected to. And Game Over is most persuasive when illustrating this.

The world created by Saravanan is populated mostly with women. But he is also seeking to build one for them, evidenced in the way he models the climax like a video game, entailing the possibility of multiple endings and disclosing his intent: the game is not over till Swapna puts up a fight. The ending here ceases to matter. This can come across as wishful thinking on his part, an unconvincing ruse even to enhance a sense of intrigue in the thriller, but his steely resolve shows when he offers a rational solution, bereft of improbability.

In times such as this, when staying alone is both a choice and compulsion, he seems to be suggesting women being there for one another as a way out to challenge and dismantle the male gaze. And he does so by using tattoos — that can segregate but also unify — as a recurrent sign and metaphor in the film. Both Swapna and the girl, killed at the outset, had tattoos imprinted on their wrists. After coming to know of this, Swapna fears the uncanny coincidence will cause her to suffer from a similar fatal eventuality till in the riveting final moments the design gets a life of its own. The tattoo not just helps her forge a connection with the other girl — which was not just unidentified but even dismissed — but serves as an unlikely source of ammunition by helping her to anticipate danger and emboldening her to face it. Game Over then becomes Saravanan’s way of ushering in a world where women are safe and recognise the power of solidarity as he sets a timely expiry date on the old one.

The world inhabited by Swapna could as well be the world inhabited by any other woman living alone. Her constant apprehension, albeit in varying degrees, could also be shared. The city here becomes incidental, so does the past. Women need not be told to be cautious. Something particularly heinous does not need to happen for them to know that something can happen to them. And Game Over resonates and disturbs precisely for upholding this. In might be a thriller, but it is futile to apprehend the criminal or the crime. The inevitability of both is disconcerting.

It is telling and ironical the film has been shot in Tamil and Telugu and dubbed in Hindi. The universality of such a fear, as portrayed in the film, can be comprehended in any language. But the same universality also demands it is told in different languages.