Antony movie review: This claustrophobic thriller doesn’t move fast enough
Antony movie review: This film starring Lal and Nishanth is about a man stuck in a car underground.
Antony
Director: Kuttii Kumar
Cast: Lal, Nishanth, Paul Michael
Rating: 1/5
What would you do if you wake up to find yourself buried underground in a car with nothing to help you escape? That is the premise of India’s first and the much-hyped claustrophobic film, Antony.
A cop, Antony, finds himself trapped in a car when he wakes up and all he sees around him is darkness. The only source of light is that of the car and he struggles to find a way out. He seems to have left his phone behind and is unable to recollect how he got himself into this situation.
Meanwhile, his girlfriend, Maha is waiting to get married to him at the registration office with the help of Antony’s father played by Lal.
The film that should have been a race against time becomes a drag within the first 20 minutes as it is ridden with huge plot holes. For instance, in a bid to recall, the protagonist remembers that he had a lot to drink with his father and friends on the occasion day before his marriage. He remembers driving through a storm, and then he draws blank. This is exactly how the audience feels throughout the film.
The people on the outside who are supposed to rescue him are doing a half-assed job while Antony just comes up with innovative ideas to stay alive. For instance, Maha was almost kidnapped a few days ago and Antony got into a tussle with a mean man called Kiruba, but she doesn’t recall this for the longest time. Lal, as the father, tries to portray the frustration by chain smoking, and his friends, who are supposed to help him rescue Antony, kill the goons who are supposed to be giving them a lead on where Antony is.
If this was not enough to have you exclaim ‘What is wrong with these people?’, we have Antony rummage through his car storage to find cello tape, long thread and steel rods. There are other things that he uses to hold the car together, as he finds that he is in fact buried underground. It is at this moment that we see why the movie was rumored to be a rip-off of Ryan Reynolds’ film Buried.
However, it is nowhere close. Antony oscillates between trying to find out who buried him by going through a list of his enemies and thinking about Maha. He holds on to his dear life for Maha, even as he hurts himself trying to finding a way out, being hungry and thirsty and bleeding.
Sadly, the audience might not understand what Antony is hoping to achieve through his actions. He uses his strength to push through rods connected by ropes through the ground and finds a way to draw in oxygen and breathe. But when the car battery runs out and the light goes out. He uses a lighter, which is in itself a dangerous act in a closed space with not much oxygen, but he lights a newspaper and let’s smoke through the rods. If this was supposed to be a smoke signal, it doesn’t come across too well.
The film further suffers from bad sound design, which more often than not is out of sync with what is progressing on screen.
The film with a promising premise loses to bad writing, poor performances by the actors and the sound. The one take away remains the visuals of the film, which are impressive.
Author tweets @Priyanka_S_MCC
Follow @htshowbiz for more