Sabdham Movie Review: Cacophony of intriguing ideas

One of the most enticing elements of the horror genre is how the paranormal entities and their terrifying hold on the living are presented. From transparent phantoms to otherworldly demons, filmmakers have found creative ways to represent our fear of the unknown. Director Arivazhagan, with exceptional imagination, had managed to wrought fear and dread out of a simple, ubiquitous element: water, in his 2009 directorial debut, Eeram. Consequently, when it was announced that the director was back to the horror genre, with sound as its central element, expectations were understandably high.

Director: Arivazhagan
Cast: Aadhi, Lakshmi Menon, Simran

Contrary to its deceptively simple title, Sabdham unravels its story on an eerily silent and intriguing note. Mysterious suicides in a hillside college, a professor with disturbing visions about the deaths, college management with suspicious intentions, and a paranormal investigator. The film has several interesting story threads, enough to keep us hooked. But as we follow these threads, we are constantly pulled away by a number of distracting issues. The chiefest of them all are the surprisingly bland dialogues and their tonally flat deliveries. For a major portion of the film, we are served condensed expositions and character motivations packaged in the form of interactions. The relationships between characters seem to go through an unusual progression. Lakshmi Menon’s Avanthika and Aadhi’s Ruben start off as people with contrasting ideologies, which naturally evolves into a flirtatious enmity, and later into romance. However, the dialogues underlining their interactions do nothing to signal their changing dynamics. We have to rely on our familiarity with cinematic conventions to understand that they both like each other all of a sudden. As to the why? It’s anybody’s guess.

MS Bhaskar appears briefly towards the middle of the film, in a prominent role that is designed to spout crucial exposition. In a strange move, the director has made Bhaskar’s character speak in Malayalam, only to make him convey all the important plot information. While Bhaskar is undoubtedly a great performer, the added complexity of his Malayalam deliveries, his ethnicity adding nothing of value to the story, makes us struggle to understand the important information. A significant jump in quality is observed when Simran walks in and effortlessly steals the scene, showing us how more such focused performances could have saved the film. Arun Bathmanaban’s cinematography leverages every visual splendour you could derive from the film’s genre and its setting. Even if it’s a horror cliche at this point, the ever-present fog adds to the isolation of the characters. If not for its genre, Sabdham remains true to its central element, designing an exquisite auditory experience with its sound design, even to the point of borderline experimentation, with two minutes of blacked-out screen where we hear the horrors unfolding entirely through sound.

Sabdham, for all its technical brilliance, makes the cardinal sin of the horror genre by failing to deliver a single thrilling moment. Moreover, the desperation is palpable with red herring jump scares, and it is almost always something predictable like a prank or a video game pause screen. Such attempts reveal the filmmaker’s lack of confidence in the story, and that is unfortunately transmitted to the audience as well. The story clearly does not deserve such disrespect, as it is ripe with several interesting ideas. There is a thematic parallel between the good forces using music and the evil forces empowered by dark science and the chaos of noise itself. Aadhi’s paranormal investigator has all the makings of a Sherlock-ian detective. There are interesting ideas connecting out-of-body experiences, subconsciousness, and afterlife. Sound and its forms, like music and noise, being used as a way for the undead to communicate with the physical world, lends itself to several thematic interpretations.

Even though the film has a number of interesting ideas, they do not rise up in coherence to create a pleasing symphony. Instead, all we get is a discordant cacophony of several story elements forcefully made to fit together. Sabdham’s central issue can be described through a pivotal scene that arrives towards the middle. In one of the biggest stretches of exposition, Aadhi’s character explains every single gadget he uses as a paranormal investigator, in painstaking detail. There is one that records thermal signature, one that captures frequencies beyond the human range, and a contraption that beeps whenever a ghost is nearby. He does end up using them at some point, and we do understand how they work but it matters next to nothing when all of the exposition culminates into a scene where all the equipment goes haywire, recording extraordinary levels of paranormal presence, while barely anything registers on an emotional level for the audience.