RANGE: C / 30%

It is ‘Pizza’ that should be charged for misleading its audience with an overloaded use of ‘deus ex machina’. Before continuing, let me explain what the term ‘deus ex machina’ means in the same way that film critic Roger Ebert did when reviewing Spike Jonze’s delightful ‘Adaptation’, quoting from Wikipedia; the term is used for “a plot device whereby an apparently unsolvable problem is solved suddenly and abruptly, with the artificial and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, skill or object.” While Adaptation is able to inventively, ingeniously, and effectively fit this device into its plot structure, Pizza leaves its audience baffled in search of answers only to reveal after the important pieces were kept hidden the entire time. The sole purpose of his deus ex machina is for his writer and director Karthik Subbaraj to show how “incredible” his twist is; the problem is that the audience doesn’t say ‘Oh how could I miss this!’ on Pizza because the movie’s plot never allowed them to capture it in the first place. The twist takes the movie onto a whole new tangent that we couldn’t have guessed at all, and we were left cold – I want my money back!

Pizza begins with a group of ghost hunters looking for paranormal activity in a supposedly haunted house, ending in suspense the moment their device detects a presence. That’s when our lead actor turns off the television the ‘movie’ was running on and we’re taken to the real stage where our lead couple is huddled, talking about ghosts. We learn that Lady Anu is a horror story writer and is doing research by watching a number of movies and books, while her boy, Michael, is a pizza delivery man who has reservations about anything supernatural. While delivering a file to his boss’s house, Michael discovers that his boss’s daughter is possibly possessed by a spirit and her father is desperately trying to heal her. This incident especially haunts him because the girl looks directly at him while possessed and yells the name ‘Nithya!’ demonically. The other incident that haunts him is Anu’s announcement that she is pregnant, but they reconcile and marry in private. One night, the owner finds him in the pizzeria covered in blood along with his companions, who are also very bruised. He then tells the others about his nightmare experience in a house where he had gone to deliver pizzas. After this incident, Anu disappears and attempts to locate her also fail.

The movie gave me nothing to look for, and Subbaraj left out too many things that could have facilitated my attempts to make sense of the movie. You should be able to poke fun at your audience in a way that when they are misled, they don’t feel misled. In a great movie like M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Sixth Sense’, the twist didn’t need further clarification because we knew it sold us, and then we were able to sit back and think about all the subtle clues we missed during the movie. At Pizza, the twist fails badly, and the most explicit proof of its failure is the fact that it required five to ten minutes of clarification in the resolution to show us how it really worked. This time is taken to reveal things that were not shown to us at all before, and could have simplified our confusion without losing the effectiveness of the desired twist.

While I praise Karthik Subbaraj’s attempt to combine the genres of horror, suspense, comedy, suspense and mystery, his film Pizza does not whet our appetites. We left the theater with a bad taste in our mouths. (note: I watched two Vijay Sethupathi movies in two days, Soodhu Kavvum yesterday and Pizza today, not realizing until I checked his Wikipedia page that he was the same actor. What a good performance!)