The Game: You Never Play Alone Tries To Be Serious, But Ends As A Parody

THE GAME: YOU NEVER PLAY ALONE is ominous not only in its title but also in its inaugural stature as Netflix India’s first Tamil original of the year. So far, Netflix has mostly dabbled in anthologies in Tamil; web series are a rarity. The world of web series is slow to take off in South India owing to factors like budget constraints, the scepticism about streaming within the film industries, and operational reasons from writing to production. It’s still at a nascent stage, even as OTT platforms introduce new series in several south Indian languages, and streaming itself is undergoing a churn in how it is viewed and operated. At this time comes The Game, a Tamil series starring Shraddha Srinath and Santhosh Prathap, written by Deepthi Govindarajan and directed by Rajesh M Selva. It takes long form’s trusted entry-level genre — thriller — and encapsulates it within a game developer’s world where digital objects become as much of a minefield as real life.

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Unfortunately, The Game doesn’t pass muster. The disappointing part is not just that the series is mediocre; it is so ordinary that the average series on YouTube and other platforms from first-time filmmakers or young teams boasts of better quality in production and direction. Almost nothing here works. Kavya (Shraddha Srinath) is a game developer with a small-time Chennai-based company; she works alongside her husband Anoop (Santhosh Prathap), though they belong to different teams. She is moderately active and famous on social media, just enough to have fans and receive hate online for the mere fact that she is a woman who speaks her mind. Just as the reaction to a sexist online interview goes out of hand and the trolls get sinister, masked men (Anoop’s flagship game is called Masked Mayhem) physically assault Kavya on the night of her winning a game development award. In the hospital the morning after, Kavya has no memory of the previous night beyond a point, and all suspicions point to the amazingly resourceful and savvy trolls on the internet.

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Almost everything in The Game is artificial, and the crew and actors seem disinterested at best. The corporate setting where Kavya and Anoop work is a joke; it comes across as a workplace imagined by people who have never been to an office. The dialogue delivery is strange, with the lines coming across as synthetic and disparate. Tamil film industry’s apathy for dubbing and lip-sync shows up here too. At one point, Kavya says, “Orey sambhavama nadandhuduchu”. Who talks like that! The production values are shoddy; nothing here could betray that this is a Netflix show. The characters are all archetypes that satisfy a few conditions: Kavya is a strong, independent woman, so she styles herself well and has a septum piercing. She socially consumes alcohol, but all the characters against this protagonist have a problem with it. This is an online troll’s version of arranging real-life scenarios, devoid of experiences outside of one’s head. 

Soon after Kavya’s assault, police officer Bhanumathi (Chandini Tamilarasan) comes into the picture and proceeds to be utterly useless. Kavya and her well-wishers take on the job of investigating while the police officers occasionally make an appearance. Unfortunately, both make little progress — not in the investigation, not in making the story gripping. Kavya’s character is extremely inconsistent. She is projected as someone direct in her interactions, at times aggressive even, but she also gives clearly terrible men second chances for no reason. The Game shapes her as it pleases, strong sometimes and naïve and pliable at other times. The series keeps hinting at Bhanumathi’s personal life through her phone calls (we don’t hear the other end), but does nothing with it. She is a Telugu-speaking police officer in Chennai, but does it matter? No. It’s just there. A lot of things in The Game are just there like adornments, which neither serve a functional purpose nor make it look pretty.

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The Game wants to be serious but ends up as a parody. Perennially, online game developers are unaware that a teenage family member’s video on their social media created havoc. Programmers talk about code like they are exchanging trump cards. The visualisation of the dark web is bizarrely funny. The Game: You Never Play Alone is laughable at times, with its barely passable filmmaking and performances. If the series wants to comment on the internet, cybercrime, privacy laws, misogyny and sexism, it makes one grand admission — it knows nothing about any of them. Tamil deserves better from Netflix. Netflix deserves better from Tamil.