Aranmanai 4 has a suspenseful moment typically one of the best giveaways in the genre early on. In Bengal, an evil amphibious spirit possesses a young girl (do with that what you may). Nevertheless, instead of running away from this creature, the girl’s father convinces this spirit to become his daughter’s imposter. Meanwhile, this movie takes us up to its title card thus taking our mind away from this brilliant idea. It is a timely reminder that small glimmers in horror are not what movies are about here but rather huge haunted houses.
However, being part of such big series does have its own pitfalls and Aranmanai 4 does try to correct some of them slightly. Therefore, instead of going into elaborate character exposition the film starts with one of its leads committing suicide (Selvi played by a sincere Tamannaah Bhatia). This forces Saravanan (director-actor Sundar C) to don his fedora and bullwhip again and delve into his sister’s sudden death. Also, director consciously avoids any overt melodrama; he keeps Saravanan and Selvi’s story short at two-minute flashback montages. The same can be said about horrible love stories for main actors in Tamil cinema (for example Raashii Khanna): as a rule they tend to be too vulgar for this genre. Such calamities have been ingeniously avoided because all eyes remain glued on two things: Horror and Comedy; however the approach taken by the directors was so straight forward that it sounded like an advert about diarrhea.
Aranmanai 4 quite literally tickles every single minor cliché in the horror manual. To think back now it would have been such a great drinking game just count all these clichés which include patients who go into comas due to fear induced by horror movies, ghost women with hair balls barely attracting attention which belonged from once loving families who were born into a world of terrible, ghosts in a haunted house, and slowly dying forests. So if you see that smoke, it means bad news. And yes, don’t forget cobras. Imagine all this with some jump scares sprinkled in-between and loud music at appropriate moments. Make no mistake about it we all love good campy horror comedy which is a genre by itself. But Aranmanai 4 just brings together the basic elements of this genre without trying to merge them at any point.
It’s not that we wouldn’t expect a comedy track to come out after an overly sentimental scene. Or big laughs about something completely silly (Yogi Babu and VTV Ganesh do the honors) right after a major revelation about the scary ghost is overheard. But Aranmanai 4 does this with a frustrating sense of mediocrity. The jokes remain unsurprisingly aimed at the lowest hanging fruit either around a woman or conveniently demeaning homoroticism to an extent that even when it scarcely connects (Kovai Sarala’s dalliances lighten the mood occasionally) it is still forgettable.
But it is not all these obvious templates that are the biggest problem with Aranmanai 4. It lies in its temptations to needlessly glorify how far a mother can go for her children. While some horror and invention are introduced by the film, we’re still left with one question nonetheless. Yes, the ghost is always female, but why should she also be a mommy martyr? Filmmaker KS Ravikumar interjects amidst doubt, with annoyed features on his face, through a remotely fun cameo and gives us an important flashback. “Don’t you lot usually just do a pooja and drive the ghost away?” That’s probably everyone’s favourite moment in Aranmanai 4.
Watch Aranmanai 4 For Free On Putlocker.