Prasanth Varma’s Awe (2018) Movie Review

Starcast: Kajal Aggarwal, Nithya Menen, Regina Cassandra, Eesha Rebba, Murali Sharma, Rohini, Srinivas Avasarala, Pragathi and Priyadarshi.
Music Composed by Mark K Robin
Directed by Prasanth Varma
Cinematography by Karthik Ghattamaneni
Edited by Gautham Nerusu

“Take me to a land where things don’t get personal, where molestation and abuse is different from appreciation, where my wings don’t hurt people and where I can be me as fearlessly as possible“

We all have dreams to achieve, goals to conquer and for that, we try to swim across the opportunity oceans, climb the trust mountains and burn the ego fields to get there. The journey seems to decide what we are and how we are perceived by others. But what if the journey is so clumsy and filled with regrets? We may become someone else altogether and in trying to fight our own demons, if we lose us, what are we, then?

Always a popular thought process is not what we connect with instantly but what we aspire to connect with. Yes, Lord Krishna‘s thought process is Bhagavad-Gita, do we connect with it instantly? We need time to process and we need enough ammunition in our knowledge bank to get each and everything said in those 108 shlokas. It might be fiction, it might be real, but it is a necessity. The thought process to accept the life, understand it with all the complications and rise above the vices, is a difficult one to achieve. As they say, if you know your vices, you know your strengths.

Now, why is a thought process, so important? It can be destructive and constructive at the same time. It can make us seem the healthiest person on the face of the earth and the most vulnerably weak too. That is Awe!. It suggests to us, how the thought process of a young girl has changed with time due to the madness in the society. It is guided by the harsh reality and thus, she ends disliking herself. How did she end up on that coffee table? The plot revolves around telling us what made her what she became. Okay, what did she become?

Her name is Kali, an incarnation of Shakthi. We adore our girls and woman as Shakti and the most fearful form of Shakti is Kali. She takes nine different forms like Nava-Durga (Lakshmi – Money; Annapurna – Cooking; Gayatri – Invention; Saraswathi – Knowledge; Bala Tripura Sundari – Innocence; Chandi – Destructive; Mahagauri – peaceful yet unsubmissive; Durga – Strength; Kali – Killer of Demons)but to become Raja Rajeswari and attain peace, she needs to kill the bullish demon, that refuses to leave her. What a sad state of affairs for a bright mind. She could become a good chef by watching videos, she could become a great trickster, she could analyze things better than anyone, but she had to kill Radha, the innocence in her and that frustration led to being Meera, who loathes for Krishna, who is more settled. In process of becoming Krishna, her ultimate goal, the ‘Sugar’ of Meera killed Radha, and instead, a more stubborn Shiva has born within her.

Shiva is more known as Smasana Nivasa. For him, death is just another routine thing but can he accept that? He needed his Shakti, to come back as Parvathi after Sati. As Shiva cannot live without Parvathi, he needs the destructive aspect of thought process to become stable and more reliable. So, when she became Shiva, the other half, Parvathi needed to guide her to be strong to achieve what she needs. But did she need to invent the time machine or really go back in it, to change the past??

She has been going back and forth in her thought process rather than in reality. Her reality has been so morbid that she needed to become a trickster and so good at that, she even let her Ego (Magician) better of her. As the walls of her ego started crushing her existence, she accepted that there is someone above her with childish valor that her heart demands from her. As a child, Moksha(m), can never be her goal but the true believer in her wanted to attain ultimate satisfaction. Can we achieve that with a polluted mindset? No, we succumb to our vices so much that we do not even know when did we become a ‘Joker‘ or a clown to the world and us, as well. We make ourselves, an ego filled self-boaster that people decide to joke about at every possible step.

Well, Prashanth Verma did not complicate the narration but got in wrong in terming the entire theme as multiple personality disorder. There, he lost the brownie points. To dumb it down for many to understand, how one person can be so many at the same time, he tries to attribute it to a disease. Maybe we all have some or the other disorders like DSM-V, but the problem isn’t that. It is more personal, more self-destructive and creative. It is about how one person travels so much in life that it seems, she became so many persons that she doesn’t know whom she wants to end up being. She will be always remembered as a person who tipped huge, a donor who lives on in a more peaceful manner within the society.