Taking a look back at Khamoshh: Khauff Ki Raa, Subhash K Jha wonders if anyone remembers this horror-ible thriller in an unique installment of his feature series this time titled This Drivel That Year.
The biggest suspense about this film is, what’s Juhi Chawla doing here??!! Sporting reading glasses and trying earnestly to look like a criminal psychologist who has just unearthed the biggest mystery about serial killing (no, not that they’re a new breed in Hindi films), she brings in a kind of mellowness that the shrieking proceedings don’t deserve.
And then there is Shilpa Shetty, last seen giving a rousing and sensitive performance in Phir Milenge. Here she’d back to doing what she’s best known for—wriggling her posterior and making 101 faces into the camera. Shilpa is a sex worker who thumbs a ride with newcomer Rajeev Singh, who’s secretary to a dangerously under-dressed music-video floozie (Rakhi Sawant) who gets bumped off midway…or somewhere close by.
One loses track of time while watching this gruesome, ghoulish, and jumbled murder mystery. Director Deepak Tijori keeps going into wackily distanced time zones unannounced. One minute, we’re watching Ms Shetty drive down a barren highway. The next minute, she’s writhing and groaning on the dancefloor in one of those beer bars that would throw Mumbai’s moral police into a fit of anger… But they needn’t despair. Two minutes later, she’s back on the highway, pouting and peering anxiously into her car’s engine space.
Space is a commodity that’s in short premium. The characters cram and cramp the frames with their creaking contradictions. They’re all murderous and ‘murder-able’. And they are constantly running in and out of a marooned motel where Ram Gopal Varma might have shot the sequel to Darna Manaa Hai if Deepak Tijori hadn’t.
All the characters are shown to be in fits of anger, anguish, and a general fear of the unknown. The ‘unknown’ is, frankly, quite a commodious term here. There’s a psychotic convict (Kelly Dorjy) on a rampage and another loony(Makrand Deshpande) in prison. A stammering spouse tends to a wife who’s rapidly bleeding to death until Rajiv Singh sews her neck with an ordinary needle-and-thread. “Good job,” Shawar Ali observes appreciatively.
Wish we could say the same about Deepak Tijori’s cut-and-waste thriller. It has no coherent psychological basis nor any clear-headed narrative pattern. By unnecessarily complicating the editing pattern, Tijori further worsens the bleak and babbling scenario.
We are left looking at a crime thriller which provides a new definition to mental harassment in movie theatres.
The performances are uniformly hammy. Newcomer Rajiv Singh stands out with a split-personality debut. His voice is clearly dubbed by someone else, thereby further aggravating our sense of being witness to a murder mystery where the victims are sadly out of sync with the ground rules of the genre.
For the record, there are no conventional romantic pairs, no weepy mothers, and long-suffering sisters in sight. But yes, there are plenty of dead bodies… and two item songs by the sexy Ms Shetty, including one performed entirely in bed.
One of the petrified and mystified characters compares the murders in this film to those in that old whodunit, Gumnam.
“But all the murder victims in Gumnam knew each other. We don’t know one another!” reasons Shilpa Shetty.
The makers of Gumnam would be hard-pressed to recognize Khamoshh as an offshoot of their product.
Times have changed. Shilpa Shetty has the guts to play a smoking, swearing tart, but when it comes to the dance floor, she’s back to square one.
