Diya

Diya Synopsis: The aborted child of a couple goes after her own family members who were responsible for separating her from her mother.

Diya Review: Diya opens with the parents of Thulasi (Sai Pallavi) and Krishna (Naga Shourya) coming to know of the pregnancy that has resulted out of the 20-year-olds’ relationship, and wondering over the next course of action. Cut to five years later, and we see the two getting married. We also learn that Thulasi’s pregnancy was aborted so that she can pursue medicine and Krishna can get a job. But very soon, their family members who coerced her to choose abortion end up dead; even the doctor who performed the procedure dies. All these deaths seem accidents, but Thulasi realises that there is something sinister at play — the aborted baby, whom she calls as Diya (Baby Veronika) is responsible for the deaths. And Diya’s next target is her own father!

Diya is structured as a revenge thriller, the main difference being that it is the ghost of a child — an unborn one, at that — which is on a killing spree. And the victims are its own family! The script doesn’t have a lot of flab, and at about 100 minutes, the film feels sprightly enough. And Sai Pallavi comes up with a competent performance, both as the mother who pines for her lost child, and the wife who is frantically trying to save her husband. Nirav Shah’s cinematography lends sheen to the visuals while Sam CS’s score maintains the element of dread.

Surprisingly, despite these strengths, Diya isn’t compelling enough. Vijay works with tropes that are too familiar — lonely apartment block, freak accidents, bumbling cops (the comic scenes with RJ Balaji are quite jarring compared to the sombre tone of the film), and underwritten characters who we never come to care about. These turn the film somewhat predictable. Given that Vijay isn’t interested in exploring the ethical dilemmas that surround abortion — he is quite unabashed in his anti-abortion stance — the film doesn’t feel different from many of the ghost movies that we have seen in Tamil cinema in the recent years.