The film Annabelle Sethupathy starts with a Palace where approximately a dozen ghosts are trapped. However, these ghosts have no idea of how they died and got stuck here. They don't know how to get out of this place either. Whenever anyone enters this palace and eat food inside during Pournami, they die and become the member of this ghost gang. For decades, these trapped ghosts are waiting for someone to enter and free them all from this palace.
Slides change and we are introduced to Rudra (Taapsee Pannu) and her equally jumbled family. Rudra and her family are a group of pickpocketers. The main story begins with a few scenes that bear no resemblance to the major plot yet are amusing in a childlike sense. We've already squandered the first half of our attention on this, and about half of our enthusiasm has been depleted. A local inspector however tries his luck by hiring the con family to remain in the palace and clean it for him to see how things work. But, despite eating the food offered by the ghosts on Pournami day, Rudhra (Taapsee) the con family's daughter is surprisingly alive, and she also gains the ability to see all of them.
Meanwhile, in past, Rudhra is Annabelle, and her husband Veera Sethupathi (Vijay Sethupathi), the visionary and ruler behind the great palace, is assassinated by the family who owns the castle. Deepak Sunderrajan, the director, has developed a fantastic story but seems like forgot to put any effort into it. He failed to bring out the best in each actor. With the exception of the flashback, the rest of the plot is extremely sparse. The plot becomes tedious as we are repeatedly offered the same scary comedy moments.
The makers tried to create a horror-comedy with a heavy dose of slapstick humour. The background score is good, but the songs aren't particularly memorable. The palace set of the film definitely deserves applause for actually looking scary.
Talking about the performances, Taapsee's scenes with her father, Rajendra Prasad, are among the greatest in the film. With such a huge cast of well-known comedians, the film could have been much funnier, but it only manages to get a few laughs here and there. Vijay Sethupathi only appears in the second half of the film, and his sequences with Taapsee, who plays a double role, might have been more emotive to make us root for the couple. Although, I still wonder that brilliant performers like Sethupathi and Pannu signed up for a film like this.
One of the notable performers is Yogi Babu's Shanmugha, who used to be a cook at the estate and has played a crucial role in the hauntings. The rest of the cast, which includes Jagapathi Babu and Radhika Sarathkumar, tries to be funny, but the script fails them.
All in all, Annabelle Sethupathy makes no attempt to stand out. It's a film where the influences are all over the place. It's more effective as a fantasy comedy than as a horror film. The film is a mash-up of genres, including horror, thriller, drama, and madcap comedy in which a large number of characters are crowded into a single frame and forced to behave crazily.
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