Ashwin Saravanan on ‘Connect,’ Nayanthara, and cracking the horror genre
(Originally published in The Hindu on December 20, 2022)
Ashwin Saravanan, a filmmaker with a fondness for the genre of horror, accepts that people nowadays are bound to be sceptical when stepping into a new Tamil horror film. As he agrees, the good-is-to-dud ratio justifies the same, but Ashwin doesn’t care about how you step into his film. “The beauty of cinema is to be able to break all doubts over those two to three hours. All I care about is whether the audiences leave the theatre with the intention and emotion that I want to leave them with,” he says.
With Connect, his third in the horror genre after Maya (2015) and Game Over (2019), Ashwin hopes that the audience will leave his screens feeling hopeful. The film, headlined and produced by Nayanthara (who also collaborated with Ashwin in Maya), is about a family that gets separated due to the COVID-19-induced lockdown. “How the family pulls through when one of them gets possessed by a demon is what comprises the story,” says Ashwin.
Excerpts from an interview:
Firstly, what’s the reason behind the title ‘Connect’?
There are two reasons. One is that to ‘connect’ with each other, we all had to resort to video calls during the lockdown. And we know that the screen displays ‘connecting..’ whenever the network connection is poor. This becomes a recurring motif in the film. Secondly, the entire film is about…
Read the full interview here: