Athomugam Movie Review: A film with scattered highs that tries its best to sell its carefully curated moments

Athomugam Movie Synopsis: A dramatic turn of events ensues when the protagonist (Martin) installs a spy app on his wife’s (Leena) mobile phone to surprise her for their wedding anniversary. Through this app, he can see whatever his wife is doing at the moment via the mobile camera. How will this decision by the protagonist change the course of his life forever?

Athomugam Movie Review: Athomugam provides a crash course on how someone with a partner can start having sleepless nights. The answer is simple—you just have to install a spy app on your partner’s phone through which you can keep tabs on everything that they’re doing. In the film, Martin (SP Siddarth) installs a spy app named Hidden Face on his wife Leena’s (Chaitanya Pratap) phone, even though he is not doing it because he is suspicious of her.

Martin came up with the idea to give Leena a surprise on their wedding anniversary. When his co-worker tells him that his girlfriend still praises him for installing a spy camera on her phone and making a surprise video by editing her ‘cute expressions’, Martin believes there couldn’t be a better way than this to surprise his wife.

Obviously, there’s a lot of convenient writing that takes place with this plotline. The fact that this guy thought that invading his wife’s personal space and compiling her ‘cute expressions’ was the best gift he could give her on their anniversary is in itself a big issue. But, even if we keep that aside, what he sees via the camera feels more like a compilation of carefully curated moments that the makers wanted the audience to see.

The issue with Athomugam is that the editing, the cinematography and the music are all individually solid. But the amalgamation of it all isn’t that impactful. The background score by Saran Raghavan magnifies everything that plays out on screen. The score not being subtle isn’t the problem, but because it’s too loud at times, we clearly feel as if something is missing in the scenes without the background score.

The cast fails to make an impact and a few of the dialogues are also unintentionally funny, including one that goes, ‘Only if the chicken dies, we will be able to get 65.’ Even then, a few scenes give you a cinematic high, including the climax portions. Also, irrespective of its faults, the makers have been successful in maintaining the audience’s interest throughout its runtime.

But Athomugam fails to be lucid. When a character reenters the film, the amplified background music and the protagonist’s shock at seeing that man give a cue for the audience to be shocked at seeing that character again. But by that time, we have completely forgotten that character that it takes a second to register who it even is.