Athomugam Movie Review: An underwhelming tech thriller with a hackneyed plot

Writer-director Sunil Dev’s Athomugam is a thriller that follows a couple in Ooty who get involved in a conspiracy. The film starts with Martin (SP Siddarth) wanting to give a surprise gift to his wife Leena (Chaitanya Pratap) through a series of clues in paper bits. But as it turns out, the lady already knows what the man is up to, and she ends up surprising him instead. This makes him think about surprising his wife in a way that she won’t even see it coming, and he ends up using a hidden face app on her phone to secretly record her activity so that he can make a montage out of it later. However, the more he sees the live feed from her phone, the more he starts to wonder whether she is the person he thought she was.

Director: Sunil Dev

Cast: SP Siddarth, Chaitanya Pratap, Ananth Nag, Arun Pandiyan

Athomugam is an ancient Tamil word that means ‘hidden face’. Almost every other character in the film behaves like they have an ulterior motive, an aspect of their character they keep concealed. After a certain point, it becomes challenging for some of the characters and even the audience to decide whom to trust and whom not to. As far as plot goes, Athomugam has thriller tropes such as “an innocent person on the run” and people prying on others, as well as a great deal of cliched shenanigans.

The film tries to present its hidden camera application as a revolutionary invention, but at a time when sci-fi ideas involving AI from Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part I or Person of Interest are at an arm's distance, this feels rather odd and underwhelming. A portion where one character explains how the application works reminded me of a scene from Joshiy’s Salaam Kashmier, where Jayaram explains how a virus on social media can take down even military networks. But to its merit, the Jayaram film was made more than a decade ago.

The datedness in Athomugam is not necessarily a deal-breaker, as cinema is more about how a story is told, regardless of the narrative devices. For instance, even a film as recent as Chathur Mukham uses familiar technology to say a lot about humans and their overdependence on technology. But unlike Chathur Mukham, Athomugam focuses more on its narrative devices and plot than the characters themselves. Its plot is such a long stretch and so hackneyed that it makes you wonder why some of its characters want to harm the rest. There are some clues and hints early on that help explain why a character behaves in a certain way, but this is not true for everyone in the film.

Oddly enough, the film that emphasises so much about technology and the elements surrounding it is a revenge story concerning real estate. Had the plot been more linear, the film would have had the probability of being a no-frills thriller, but this is hardly the case here. It also does not help that a large part of Athomugam relies on exposition. When Sunil keeps dumping one piece of information after another, it is natural for the audience to feel distracted. Adding to this, the performances in Athomugam are also a letdown.

Cinematographer Arun Vijaykumar offers some picturesque frames from Ooty, and Saran Raghavan’s background music, despite adding some sense of urgency to a few scenes, gets exhausting like the film very soon.

To conclude, Athomugam is one of those thrillers that has lots to say about mankind and its technological dependence. How I wish its writing matched its sincere ambitions!