Nayagi (2016)

Even for a horror comedy, the premise of Naayagi feels flimsy. It involves Sanjay (a game Satyam Rajesh), a sleazeball, who decides to take his girlfriend 'conservative' Sandhya (Sushma Raj, decent) to his friend's farmhouse with the intention of sleeping with her, even as he is trying to enter into wedlock with a rich woman. They are diverted to a "restricted area" where people have been mysteriously disappearing from for years. The bungalow they move into is haunted by the ghost of Gayathri (Trisha), who aspired to be actress, and has been taking out men who have wronged women. And the duo becomes her target for almost 70 per cent of the film that after a point we begin to feel as if the video is being played on loop. Then, we get the flashback. After all, those who have stuck with the film till then deserve to be told why the ghost, for all her powers, doesn't kill the guy right away, right? Ganesh Venkatraman appears in this episode channelling Sathyajith of 16 Vayadhinile (perhaps that's why we see Gayathri often humming Senthoora Poove), but we hardly get any surprise in finding out what had happened then. Naayagi seems to have been made targeting the people who made Aranmanai a success (the film's clips are even featured in this one), and the tone (and the tacky makeup and the shoddy visual effects) seems to have been borrowed from that film. But the problem is we never find any of the scenes funny. Even Brahmanandam, who appears in a cameo that doesn't do justice to his comic skills, cannot goad us into laughing. But unfortunately, we are actually tickled only during the scenes where petite Trisha is shown as a scary ghost.