Ammu begins innocently enough — our eponymous heroine Ammu (Aishwarya Lekshmi) get married to Ravi (Naveen Chandra). She has been brought up in a conservative family and it is as good as it gets for a woman in her milieu — Ravi is a police circle inspector and a good match, as per her parents. They have grown up in the same neighbourhood and their families have been friends for years. Ammu happily acquiesces to the wedding, finding comfort in the belief that he will take good care of her.
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And he does. In the first 30 minutes of the film, Ravi is the model husband and Ammu falls in love with him. You begin to wonder if the makers were messing with your mind when they showed you the Ammu trailer and made you believe it was about domestic violence. His reality, however, is revealed eventually and we find out that the persona of a perfect gentleman and a caring husband is an alter-ego that he has created to hide his sociopathic tendencies within the four walls of his house.
Just when Ammu is settling into the marriage and presumes that she is well acquainted with her new husband, she is jolted by a shock. She thinks Ravi snapping at her was just an anomaly. He won’t repeat it. She’s wrong. Ravi doubles down on his ill-treatment of Ammu and we see him slapping her right across the face. And when it finally happens, what does she do? She tells her mother Kalpana. The first question that Ammu gets from Kalpana is, ‘What did YOU do?’ Kalpana recalls the advice she received from her mother: “Suck it up. Men are like that only.” To her credit, Kalpana advises Ammu to do what she thinks is the best.
In the following days, the violence only increases. Ammu now has a black eye and bruised lips. She finds herself trembling in fear at a bus station with a packed bag. She is unable to make up her mind about whether to stay or leave. And that’s when she meets a true gentleman, a beggar played by Raghu Babu. He offers to counsel her during the crisis for a pack of biriyani. But, he doesn’t stop Ammu when she decides to go back to Ravi. She talks herself into believing that there’s some shortfall in her affection and love for her husband. And she naively believes her suffering would end if she could plug the gaps in her unconditional love for Ravi. The beggar is disappointed but he doesn’t like mansplaining. He knows the change must come from within, so he doesn’t dictate what she should do.
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Aishwarya and Naveen have given a very convincing and committed performances. There are several sequences in the film that decode the stages of domestic abuse. It starts with slight aberrations in behaviour and if not checked at the very onset, it will become terminal and beyond saving. But, the film soon deviates towards a wife’s fantasy of getting revenge from her husband. She doesn’t seek to solve the problems in her life through available legal and social means, instead Ammu comes up with a convoluted scheme, which involves a double-murder convict Prabhu (Bobby Shima).
For the majority of the narration, director Charukesh Sekar has us buying into the realism and then he switches to fantasy. While domestic abuse is very much a reality and faced by millions of women across the world, it’s not always possible for a victim to come up with a clever ploy like Ammu’s to get even with her abuser. The tonal shift is jarring and even feels dishonest to the very disturbing subject that it’s dealing with.
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Ammu could be described as a movie that serves its purpose. There is nothing more appealing to this movie beyond its use of creating awareness about certain aspects of domestic abuse. And this film achieves that in a very straightforward way, which is even predictable at times. While Ammu captures the horrors faced by the survivors of domestic abuse, the film lacks maturity, depth and a unique point of view. It feels too obvious and one-tone.
Ammu is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
