Choreographer turned director Raghava Lawrence deserves credit, if not for anything else, at least for reminding the people of a forgotten genre in Tamil cinema -- horror. Muni is a good break away from the worn out love stories and senseless action which are being rammed down the viewers' throats week after week.

However, it stops at being just a reminder, as the story has almost all the regular components and doesn't dwell much on horror that it starts off with. In fact it would be apt to say that Lawrence had chosen one of those usual plots and let it take a small initial detour only to get back to the regular course a little later.

Though the movie starts off looking like the story of Ganesh, with the end of the first half, the character becomes quite insignificant and Muni (or his ghost) takes centrestage. Completely scared of ghosts, college student Ganesh (Lawrence) refuses to step out of his room after dark -- to the extent that he wants his mother to accompany him to the loo!

As in many other horror flicks, the happy family moves into a new beautiful bungalow wherein they find a ghost for company. The spirit, of a fisherman Muni (Rajkiran), seeks a mortal body to take revenge for its death from the corrupt MLA Dandapani (Dandayuthapani). The good hearted Ganesh offers his own body for the purpose and the rest of the story leads to the expected happy ending.

Having played similar roles almost all his life, Raj Kiran has quite mastered the limited number of expressions he has to offer. Interestingly, the story has ignored a lot of stereotypes associated with ghosts and spirits and the viewer comes across a ghost that is almost human. Due to this, the movie loses its purpose of being scary. The ghost can be seen by one and all, and can be caught by a camera too! Funnily, in certain scenes it seems to be capable of doing anything that it wishes to do. So after a while, one might wonder why it needs to possess Ganesh's body. However, Lawrence fails as funny Ganesh.

Though Bharadwaj's music is not outstanding, the tracks contribute to the feel of the movie. The technical crew of Suresh Urs, K V Guhan and Nikhil has done a good job.

Though the first half of the movie seems frivolous, it has, nevertheless contributed to building up the plot, which takes a serious turn in the second half where it ceases to be scary.

Given the fact that even the most seriously made Indian horror movies induce more laughter than fear, Lawrence has quite smartly mixed a fair amount of humour, even in the scariest scenes in the movie-- at least he can claim that they were intentional.

Like his debut as a choreographer (in Amarkalam), his directorial debut also comes under Saran's banner and hopefully, this will let him set a firm foot in the industry.

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