Director: Hemant Madhukar
Cast: Madhavan, Anushka Shetty, Anjali, Michael Madsen, Shalini Pandey, Subbaraju
Nishabdham/Silence (in Tamil), streaming on Prime, opens with a sequence that encapsulates almost every horror film cliché ever conceived. We first have an exterior shot of a large, desolate mansion in Seattle, and through a window, we see a young couple waltzing merrily without a worry in the world. The camera then moves inside and pans to a door that seems to be leading down to a cellar. The lights behind that door begin to flicker, and this catches the man’s attention as he makes his way slowly down into the eerie cellar. He’s greeted inside by cobwebs and a rocking armchair, that even has an Annabelle-sque doll hunched over it! His gaze (and ours) then slowly shifts to a mysteriously beautiful painting propped up against a wall corner. Before he gets a chance to examine the painting any closer though, he’s attacked brutally from behind and killed, presumably by a ‘ghost’ inhabiting the cellar. The girl who comes down looking for him faces the same fate and the mansion is officially branded ‘haunted’. Fast forward forty odd years to 2019, and we see another couple, Sakshi (Anushka Shetty) and Anthony (Madhavan) braving a visit here. Sakshi is a painter and wants to paint a replica of the old painting still lying in the cellar. Within a few moments, there is a dejavu scene, but with a minor change. Anthony is murdered brutally like the other man before him, apparently by the same ‘ghost’, but Sakshi escapes with injuries. This time around though, Anthony being a celebrity musician (he’s a cello player), the police launch a criminal investigation bypassing the ‘haunted house’ angle.
You can’t fault Nishabdham’s set up, however cliched it might sound. The mystery is real. Is the mansion really haunted, or was this all a set up to get away with cold blooded murder? Working the case is Officer Maha (Anjali), a Telegu speaking NRI who is part of the Seattle police force (what were the odds)! It doesn’t help that her only witness Sakshi is mute by birth. The prime suspect is Sonali (Shalini Pandey), Sakshi’s best friend, who investigation reveals is compulsively obsessive over her. The plot thickens further when it is revealed that Sonali herself has now gone missing.
If you cull just the story out from this film, you would find that it has a lot of promise. The way things turn on their head towards the end is pretty startling for one. The twists are solid and the suspense isn’t given away cheaply either. But the craft of filmmaking is all about how this story is narrated visually, in an engaging manner. A great recent example from Tollywood itself is a film like Hit that packed a punch as a slick, sharp thriller. Nishabdham on the other hand feels a little too bloated. For starters, there is too much exposition. Sample this- Maha has a relative who we are told is a psychiatrist, a classic red herring preparing us for a psychological angle later on in the plot, and true to this notion we get a long lecture from her in another scene explaining how manic obsessiveness over another person could be classified as a psychological disorder. This is followed by more elaborate scenes, where we see Sonali obsess over her childhood friend Sakshi and you wonder if we couldn’t have grasped all this ourselves by just watching these scenes instead of drowning in a theoretical discourse. For a film that’s named Nishabdham, you almost cry out for some..silence!
There is also then the matter of the pitch and the acting. When a film is set in a foreign country, the USA in this instance, it is really important to get the tone and pitch of the screenplay consistently right. Again some examples are Tamil films like Achchamundu, Achchamundu and more recently, Vellai Pookal that really nailed this. But here in Nishabdham/Silence, the writing is sketchy and the tone seems off in more than one place. A lot of this is down to the casting of Michael Madsen in the role of the Police Chief Dawkins. Madsen is obviously a great actor who’s featured in tons of memorable Hollywood films (like Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill) and his casting here in an Indian film sounds exciting as an idea. However, the writing completely fails to get his character’s tone right and the resultant effect is caricaturish, almost akin to Kamal Hassan’s portrayal of the Fletcher character in Dasavathaaram.
This is not to say the film didn’t have anything good going for it. Madhavan and Anushka have tried to make the most of the limited scopes offered by their roles and are graceful. Anjali’s cop character is again hampered by some dull, patchy writing, though she looks fit and looks the part. The cinematography is smooth (by Shaneil Deo), capturing unique Seattle sights like the Space Needle Tower (must ring a bell for Sleepless in Seattle/Tom Hanks fans) with the same authority as dimly lit interior shots. Gopi Sunder’s score is stock standard for this genre, though the opening song crooned by Sid Sriram really stands out (the Inkem Inkem pair teaming up again).
Nishabdham could have been a much better film, even if not a great film, had adequate care been taken to keep the writing consistent and snappier. The ingredients were all there- a good enough story, an unbelievably talented cast and an envious budget. It’s a pity the final product falls short of all the big expectations.
Overall rating: 2.5/5
