Review of 2012 Tamil Movie Pizza, directed by Karthik Subbharaj and starring Vijay Sethupathi

NOTE: C/ 30%

It is ‘Pizza’ that should be accused of misleading its audience with an overloaded use of ‘deus ex machina’. Before I continue, let me explain what the term ‘deus ex machina’ means in the same way that film critic Roger Ebert did while reviewing Spike Jonze’s delightful ‘Adaptation’, quoting from Wikipedia; the term is used for “a plot device whereby a seemingly intractable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved, with the artificial and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.” While Adaptation is able to inventively, cleverly, and effectively fit this device into its plot structure, Pizza leaves its audience bewildered in search of answers only to reveal later that the important pieces were kept hidden all along. The sole purpose of his deus ex machina is for his writer/director Karthik Subbaraj to show how ‘incredible’ his turn is; the problem is that the audience doesn’t say ‘Oh, how could I miss this!’ on Pizza because the plot of the movie never allowed them to catch her in the first place. The twist takes the movie on a whole new tangent that we couldn’t have guessed at all, and we’re 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 a cliffhanger the moment their device detects a presence. That’s when our lead actor turns off the TV the ‘movie’ was running on and we’re taken to the real set where our lead couple are huddled together, talking about ghosts. We learn that the lady Anu is a writer of horror stories and is researching watching a number of movies and books, while her boy Michael is a pizza delivery boy who has her reservations about anything supernatural. While delivering a file to his boss’s house, Michael discovers that her boss’s daughter may be possessed by a spirit and her father is desperately trying to heal her. This incident haunts him especially because the girl looks directly at him while she is possessed and calls out 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 colleagues, who are also badly bruised. He then tells the others about his nightmarish experience at a house where he had gone to deliver pizza. After this incident, Anu goes missing and attempts to locate her also fail.

The film gave me nothing to look for, and Subbaraj left a lot of things missing that might have made it easier for me to try to find some meaning in the film. You should be able to make fun of your audience so that when they are cheated, they don’t feel cheated. In a big movie like M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Sixth Sense,’ the twist didn’t need a lot of clarification because we knew it would win us over, and then we could sit back and think about all the subtle clues we missed during the movie. In Pizza, the twist fails miserably, and the most explicit proof of its failure is the fact that it required five to ten minutes of resolution clarification to show us how it actually worked. This time is spent revealing things that hadn’t been shown to us before and that could have simplified our confusion without losing the effectiveness of the intended twist.

While I praise Karthik Subbaraj’s attempt to blend the genres of horror, suspense, comedy, suspense and mystery, his movie Pizza fails to 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 it was the same actor. That’s a good performance!)