Asvins: Foregone Conclusions

Sometimes - not often, but sometimes - I’ll put on a movie to write about and within the first few minutes get the sense that it’s going to be a turkey and probably not worth my time. Usually, I’ll just stop films like this and watch something else instead. Asvins does not get off to a strong start at all, in any way, shape or form, but this time I decided I’d try to stick with one of those films instead of dismissing it immediately and seeing how it went. As it turns out, I was not at all rewarded for my efforts. It’s an incoherent mess that somehow manages to be both obtuse and obvious at the same time

Varun and his brother Arjun are vloggers who’ve decided to explore an especially creepy mansion in a remote part of England as a way to capitalize on the trend in dark tourism (visiting places where tragedies happened) and to hopefully raise their profile, go viral, all of the usual content-creator things. They’ve brought along their younger brother Rahul, who’s just found out he’s going to Germany to study audio engineering, Arjun’s wife Ritu, and Varun’s girlfriend Grace. They’re headed for an old abandoned estate that’s only accessible during low tide. It used to belong to Aarthi Rajagopal, a renowned archaeologist.

One night, 15 people were murdered there, and Aarthi apparently tortured herself to death. So it’s got a history.

So the premise is five people going into a huge abandoned building with a dark past to record what they find there, and sure enough, what they find there is very bad. This is the same basic premise as about 85% of all other found-footage horror films. But, to its credit, it ends up being about something beyond the initial premise, which is good because the initial premise is sort of run through in the first fifteen minutes, and the film is just shy of two hours long. And this is really the first of the film’s big problems - it plays like someone took the narrative beats, cut them up, threw them in the air and arranged them as they landed. It takes a surprisingly long time for the film to actually get started as it is. There’s a title card along the lines of the events depicted being fictional and any resemblance to people living or dead is coincidental. Also, no animals were harmed. Then there are multiple cards thanking multiple people, presumably for collectively funding the film. Then there are the credits for multiple production and distribution companies. And then there’s a long animated sequence in which we learn some folklore, one which both manages to give away anything that was going to be a surprise and at the same time isn’t strictly necessary since the story will be belabored extensively over the entire second half of the film. It’s very easy to come away from all of this feeling like you already know how the movie is going to go, and yeah, that’s pretty much how it goes. Then we jump into events in the current day, with what plays out like the climax of a found-footage 101 film, people running around a deserted location screaming and getting picked off by a series of jump scares.

And that’s all before the opening title. Then we bounce back to the events that lead up to those moments, in which everything (mansion belonging to an archaeologist, 15 people found murdered there, the archaeologist killed herself) is explained even though it had already been explained during the opening sequence. So we get a fairly generic found-footage film as about the first half of the movie, but one that starts at the end. And then the second half of the film sort of serves to show what was going on before, during, and after the first half, but not in a way that is necessarily easy to follow.

But all of that is okay, because we will be reminded constantly of what’s happening. This is a film that apparently assumes we have the attention span of a goldfish because we get almost all of the necessary information fed to us repeatedly through dialogue, through conveniently discovered recordings the archaeologist made in which she repeats everything we’ve already learned as well as a bunch of important points literally being written on notes tacked to a wall, which are then cut to multiple times. You know most of how the first act is going to go in the first five or ten minutes, and even have a general idea of how the rest of the film is going to go by the time you’re ten minutes into the second half and the rest is just sitting there and letting what is basically a foregone conclusion spool out. And at almost two hours long, it gets pretty tedious.

So what is happening and how we get to the end are pretty easy to figure out well in advance, but how it gets there still doesn’t follow much of a clear through-line. The film is divided up into chapters, all with titles having to do with two deaths, two lives, two worlds, two minds, and combinations thereof. Twins and two different worlds play into the story, but there’s all this stuff about people having two minds, one is stronger than the other but one of them is also a demon, I think? It doesn’t add much to the story, and on top of that, the second half of the film is littered with portentous voiceover about darkness and light and minds and worlds and demons too and none of it is especially illuminating  The action shifts in ways that I think are supposed to represent different worlds, but it isn’t clear which one is which or what’s actually happening at any given point. Is someone real or a ghost? Are they really them or a shapeshifting demon? Is this the real world or the spirit world? Is this the past or the future? For most of the film, it’s anybody’s guess and though things get a little more coherent toward the end, it’s not enough, as we get into curses and demons and people being bound together and because a demon’s controlling someone you can control the demon through the person you’re controlling, all for an ending that ends up being cliched and confusing in equal parts.

The performances don’t help any - I won’t ding the dialogue, as clumsy as it is, because that could very well be down to translation. But most of the performances are from the Scooby-Doo school of acting, all yelping and screaming and making extraneous noises in ways that don’t so much suggest emotion as bad attempts to perform emotion, lots of mugging  and melodrama at odds with the pitch of the scene otherwise. There are maybe three genuinely creepy moments in the whole thing, and that’s not nearly enough to save it.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix