Petromax (2019) is a movie about a house. It's quite a nice house, really; comfortable, well lit, and obviously well-loved. Meera (Tamannaah) lives there with her father (K.S.G. Venkatesh), her little sister Nivetha (Monekha Siva), and household sort-of-servant Santosh (the IMDB has failed me again.) They are a wonderful loving family, and blissfully happy, until they realize that the house is haunted, and soon after discover that actually, they are the ghosts.
Saravanam (Prem Kumar), who owns the house, wants to sell, but he can't get a good price because word of the apparent haunting has spread. He's forced to rely on a quartet of unlikely ghostbusters: kindly bartender Senthil (Munishkanth), mild-mannered family man Thangam (Kaali Venkat), aspiring actor Kaali (TSK), and partially deaf security guard Nandha (Sathyan). While the quartet are not especially brave or clever or competent, they each have a particular flaw that makes them hard to haunt: Senthil has a heart condition and on the advice of his doctor he reverses his emotional reactions, laughing when scared and crying when happy; Thangam is a boozy Popeye, transforming into a fearless and not very smart macho man when drinking; Kaali responds to stress with movie dialogue and filmi bravado; and Nandha is not only hard of hearing, he has literal night blindness, so he can't see or hear anything the ghosts are doing.
The plot sounds simple, but that is because I am avoiding spoiling any of the big twists. I will say that while the movie will quite gleefully use misdirection to conceal important plot points, everything makes sense in the end.
Despite the twisty plot, though, Petromax is not a terribly deep or innovative film. It's not really trying to be; it's just a horror comedy, light on the horror, heavy on the comedy. Still, it's a good horror comedy, drawing much of its humor from an engaging cast of quirky human and ghostly characters, which gives even the sillier scenes a bit of emotional heft.
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