Pizza (2012 film)

Pizza is a 2012 Indian Tamil-language horror thriller film directed by Karthik Subbaraj, based on a story he co-wrote it with Prasath Kumar and produced by C. V. Kumar under Thirukumaran Entertainment. The film stars Vijay Sethupathi and Remya Nambeesan, with Naren, Jayakumar, Karunakaran, Simha and Pooja in supporting roles. In the film, a pizza delivery man lands in a mysterious predicament that affects his life.
Pizza is the feature directorial debut of Karthik, previously a short film director. The film's music is composed by Santhosh Narayanan, with cinematography handled by Gopi Amarnath and editing done by Leo John Paul. It was the first Tamil film to feature 7.1 surround sound.
Pizza was released on 19 October 2012 and became a commercial success, grossing approximately ₹8 crores against a budget of ₹1.5 crores. It also established Sethupathi and Karthik as a leading actor and director in Tamil cinema. The film is the first instalment in a film series and was followed by two spiritual successors. It was remade in Kannada as Whistle (2013), in Hindi under the same title (2014), and in Bengali as Golpo Holeo Shotti (2014).
Michael Karthikeyan is a pizza delivery man who lives with his girlfriend Anu, an aspiring novelist. Michael does not believe in the supernatural but is afraid of anything paranormal. Anu keeps telling him that he will soon realise the presence of supernatural beings. At first, Michael is confused and scared, and his fears are confirmed when he discovers that a spirit has possessed his boss Shanmugam's daughter.
Meanwhile, Anu becomes pregnant, and they get married. One day, Michael goes to deliver a pizza and returns to the restaurant covered in blood; he keeps muttering Anu's name. When his boss questions him, Michael explains that he had been to deliver a pizza to a customer named Smitha in a bungalow and recounts the events he encountered there.
Smitha requests that Michael wait downstairs while she goes upstairs to get money for the pizza. Almost immediately, the power goes out. While waiting downstairs, Michael hears a loud noise from upstairs. Going upstairs to investigate, he finds Smitha murdered and notices a slice of pizza that he had delivered is missing. Horrified, Michael dashes to the door, only to realise it is locked from the outside.
Then the murdered woman's husband, Bobby, arrives, and he believes that his wife is having an affair. Through his cell phone, Michael communicates with Bobby and explains his situation, instigating Bobby to aid him in getting out of the house. Bobby suddenly disappears from the front entrance and is found inside the house, murdered in the same room as his wife, with two slices of pizza now missing. Michael encounters the couple's child, "Nithya", identical to the spirit's name, allegedly possessing the boss's daughter.
Michael tries everything to get out of the house. He manages to contact Anu using the phone and gets her to contact the local police. When a couple of officers arrive at the bungalow, they reveal that four people died in that house: Smitha, Bobby, their young daughter, and a girl named Anu. The police disclose that Michael is a suspect and attempt to arrest him. Confused, Michael does not believe them and attempts to escape.
Michael then sees the police officers getting dragged into the house and killed. Michael, in a horrified state, runs back to the restaurant. While Michael is unconvinced that Anu is dead, his friends at the restaurant start realising they have never seen Anu. They also notice that Michael's home does not have any evidence that he lived with Anu. Michael continues his search for Anu.
As Michael stops and calls Anu during a delivery, the true story of what happened is shown. The Income Tax Department had planned a raid on Shanmugam's house. Shanmugam, who has diamonds worth around 20 million hidden in his restaurant, hides them in a candy box and asks Michael to deliver them to his house. But Michael has a bike accident and sees the hidden diamonds. Michael and Anu decide to steal the diamonds. So, they concoct a story in which Michael convincingly "forgets" the pizza bag at the "haunted" bungalow. Meanwhile, Anu has left for Kochi via Bangalore with the diamonds, and they plan to settle abroad.
After the phone call, Michael goes to deliver a pizza to a house and encounters a series of events similar to the story he had narrated. Inside, he meets a girl identical to the "Nithya" described in his tale. Michael is locked inside the home with "Nithya" curiously looking at him. The lights then go out.
The short film director Karthik Subbaraj had initially intended for Jigarthanda to be his feature debut; he narrated the script to C. V. Kumar of Thirukumaran Entertainment, and though Kumar liked it, he declined to finance it due to budget constraints. Karthik then wrote a script for a low-budget film about a pizza delivery man stuck in a house, where the story could take place predominantly, and one of his friends agreed to finance it. While the film was originally intended to be within 90 minutes to qualify for international film festivals, Karthik later felt that it had commercial viability, and added more characters to the script. In all, it had taken him a week to finalise the story and 20 days to finish the script. Afterwards, he narrated the script to Kumar who liked it and immediately agreed to finance the film. The story was co-written by Prasath Ramar, in his career debut. Karthik chose the title Pizza, feeling it was relevant as it reflected the lead character's profession.
Vijay Sethupathi was cast as the lead actor after working with Karthik in several of his shorts and the latter approached him to play the protagonist. The name of Sethupathi's character, Michael, was derived from a turkey that Karthik once witnessed responding to that name during scripting. Remya Nambeesan accepted to do the film after being impressed by Karthik's narration. After playing a rural character in Kullanari Koottam (2011), she was excited to portray a modern and urban character who was vastly different. Karunakaran, who Karthik had known since his stint on the reality series Naalaya Iyakkunar, accepted the director's request to act in the film. This was the first collaboration between Karthik and Bobby Simha, who became a staple of the director's films, while Nalan Kumarasamy and Kavin, in his career debut, made brief appearances.
Pizza was made on a budget of ₹1.6 crore (equivalent to ₹3.0 crore or US$350,000 in 2023) and was shot in a single schedule around Chennai. Most of the horror sequences in the film unfolded in a dark bungalow, with Karthik saying, "We have seen such visuals in many films, where there will be no electricity but the audience might still be able to see the furniture in the room, the actors moving, etc. But I felt this technique would be a little fake". As a result, he wanted the entire place to be dark with the actor having a torchlight and instructed his team to refrain any lighting set up. The cinematographer Gopi Amarnath suggested him to follow the light from the torchlight and ordered a high beam torch from the United States, which they did a test shoot, and worked, thus providing a feel of a thriller.
Because Sethupathi had to act alone for 40 minutes, he took a 10-day acting workshop with a Koothu-P-Pattarai artist, hoping to attain the right mood. During filming in Duraisamy Subway, Karunakaran injured his knee during the scene where Sethupathi's character pushes him. Filming was completed within 33 days. Pizza is the first Tamil film to feature 7.1 surround sound. The film was edited by Leo John Paul. Karthik has stated that some distributors wanted the climax changed as they were not impressed with the change in genre it depicted, but he refused as he considered it the film's high point.
The soundtrack album and background score was composed by Santhosh Narayanan. The album was launched on 19 September 2012, at Sathyam Cinemas, Chennai.
The teaser trailer of Pizza released through YouTube in late-July 2012 and had garnered 30,000 views within five days, which Karthik stated that is "quite a feat for a small film starring lesser-known names". C. V. Kumar strategised on viral promotions through social media which included an advertisement that the crew asking audiences to take a pizza break for the recent films, garnering attention among film buffs. The film's distribution rights were acquired by Sangam Cinemas. Kumar spent ₹80 lakh (equivalent to ₹1.5 crore or US$180,000 in 2023) on print and advertising costs, while Sangam Cinemas also spent an equal amount. Due to its non-Tamil title and U/A certificate, the film was ineligible for entertainment tax exemption as only U-certified Tamil-titled films were eligible.
Pizza was released on 19 October 2012 by Sangam Cinemas all over Tamil Nadu. The film was released in 300 theatres initially and the number of theatres was increased to 600 after the film's positive response. It collected ₹1.85 crore (equivalent to ₹3.5 crore or US$410,000 in 2023) within two weeks of release, and its final worldwide earnings were roughly ₹8 crore (equivalent to ₹15 crore or US$1.8 million in 2023) against a budget of ₹1.5 crore (equivalent to ₹2.8 crore or US$330,000 in 2023).
N. Venkateswaran from The Times of India gave 4 out of 5 stars and wrote that director Karthik Subburaj displayed a "strong control of the medium and gives abundant display of his narrative skills", going to add: "If he maintains the quality of his menu and future offerings, Karthik [...] is sure to become one of Kollywood's top directors". Sify termed the film as "delicious" and described it as "entertaining and at the same time different in its approach". Malini Mannath from The New Indian Express described Pizza as "offbeat, intriguing and gripping, and nothing like what you've seen on Tamil screen before". Vivek Ramz of in.com rated it 3.5/5 and cited that Pizza was a "well made suspense thriller that keeps you guessing for most parts".
Malathi Rangarajan from The Hindu and Haricharan Pudipeddi from Nowrunning criticised the first half of the film. The former claimed that the second half of Pizza has a "reasonably enjoyable tanginess, but to get to that you have to sit through the protraction of the first" and that "the screenplay [...] doesn't render much help", while the latter concluded that the film displayed "signs of a craftily executed thriller, but falls short of satisfaction due to erratic narration", giving it 2.5 out of 5 stars. J. Hurtado of ScreenAnarchy wrote, "Where Pizza succeeds is that it tells a story on its own terms. There are no unnecessary flourishes designed to sell soundtrack albums, there are remarkably few comedic tangents designed to lighten the mood, and the violence and gore are fairly realistic and don't defy the laws of physics in the search to address the metaphysical".
The success of Pizza turned Sethupathi into one of the most sought-after actors in Tamil cinema. Along with Pizza, he scored back-to-back successes with Sundarapandian (which featured him in a negative role) and Naduvula Konjam Pakkatha Kaanom in the same year resulting in a rise in his popularity. Film critic Baradwaj Rangan stated that Sethupathi had become "[...] sort of [an] indie-film star, the first ever in Tamil cinema". The film, along with Attakathi, also established Kumar as a producer who went on to produce films with innovative themes throughout his career. Pizza and Kadhalil Sodhappuvadhu Yeppadi became trendsetters and sparked a short-lived boom of short film makers making their feature debut in Tamil cinema and revolutionising it. Karthik also emerged a leading director in the Tamil film industry.
Pizza was dubbed in Telugu under the same title and released on 15 February 2013. It was later remade in Kannada as Whistle later that same year, in Hindi under the same title in 2014, and in Bengali as Golpo Holeo Shotti (2014). In November 2012, it was reported that the film would be remade in English with a Hollywood production house acquiring its rights.
A sequel Pizza II: Villa was produced and released in 2013; it was produced by the same production house. The sequel did not carry on with the characters from Pizza, and was a spiritual successor instead. A third film in the series, Pizza 3: The Mummy, was released in 2023. A fourth film in the series, Pizza 4: Home Alone was announced in 2024.