Asvins Movie Review: This Dull Atmospheric Horror Trades Tension For Technical Finesse

Director: Tarun Teja Mallareddy

Writers: Tarun Teja Mallareddy, Yogesh Sudhakara Mallineni

Cast: Vasanth Ravi, Muralidaran, Vimala Raman

Five YouTubers and their cameras in a sprawling, cursed colonial mansion deep in the middle of the night and an island in the United Kingdom. What could go wrong? Literally a million things could, as horror junkies can imagine. Tarun Teja’s Asvins begins on this chilling note, just as the effective short it’s adapted from did. But the film doesn’t go the The Blair Witch Project (1999) way with its inventive use of the found-footage genre nor does it take the Poltergeist (1982) route, serving us a good old helping of the heebie-jeebies in a classic haunted house. It is instead stuck in a strange space in between, giving us superlative experiments with technical form, but with a tedious screenplay that has close to no emotional core. 

It might be tempting to dismiss Asvins at first glance for placing his mood piece in a haunted house, an overused jewel in the crown of classic horrors. But like many fans of the genre would agree, there is nothing more deliciously creepy than a haunted house classic when it’s done right. Tarun’s Asvins places five of his young protagonists on a tidal island in London, with spotty mobile signals and ominous darkness. The YouTubers — Arjun and Ritu (Vasanth Ravi and Saraswati Menon) are a couple looking to make a new life in London, Varun is a teenager with a flair for sounds, Rahul, the leader of the team is Varun’s brother, and Grace, a cameraperson — plan to scour a creepy mansion overnight and get out by sunrise. It sounds like a good plan, but of course, they are paid frequent visits by its resident murderer and deceased archaeologist Aarthi Rajagopal. 

But Asvins doesn’t want to be just another haunted horror mood piece. So, we get a compelling subplot following the Hindu twin gods Aswini Kumaras and a glitch in ancient history that provoked the devil. The film also spends much of its runtime delving into the dualities of the world —  “Everyone has two minds and two lives. And in the end, you’re only as strong as your strongest mind,” says Arjun, who has this uncanny ability to hear whispers in a room that nobody can. 

While these dualities are stunningly depicted through its use of camera and light work (its use of green is an especially ingenious touch), it doesn’t really pay off through its plotting. The writing, for one, is strangely affected by convenience. And it is also on such a basic level that it ends up moving us far away from their reality. Rahul introduces audiences to the term ‘Black Tourism’ by lecturing his sound engineer just minutes before reaching the mansion. You’d think a group of ghostbusting YouTubers might have done their research well before flying miles away from home to take up a sinister gig. 

Every horror film is powered by a solid emotional centre to help identify with their often vulnerable realities on screen. But in Asvins, every relationship or connection is already established even before we see it play out. So, the resulting tension is so recklessly negligible that no amount of jump scares and incredible sound ends up terrifying us. In its opening sequence, where five young people are running around different corners of a mansion to hang on to their dear lives with only skewed camera angles to show us what’s scaring them, we catch a glimpse of a film that Asvins could’ve been — a film that coaxes our imagination to run amok. The film instead trades this raw tension for technical grandeur.