Silence (Nishabdham) movie review - A silent mystery that muffles into a violent, messy thriller.
Disrupting your dreams, you wake up to a dozen siren shrills from the snoozing alarm. Half asleep, you cue into endlessly scheduled online classes.
Every staff starts the session with the standard question of, "Am I audible? Is my screen visible?” followed by a pin drop silence from your side until the call is disconnected.
With a sigh of relief, after this little mischief, you right-click opening a new tab to tune into your prime time. More mischievous here is Amazon Prime's search engine! That prompts you to slide into the latest OTT release, Silence (Nishabdham) starring Madhavan, Anushka Shetty.
Few minutes into the movie, you feel pushed into a silent purgatory left alone reeling with your thoughts. Tickling the filters of your consciousness, trying to replay your actions from skipping an online class to streaming Nishabdham that has left you with symptoms of screen fatigue.
The film follows a cliché haunted house introduction sequence with an occult painting in its basement, leaving the man who discovered it crucified on the wall.
Many years later (Of course, with the help of VFX), A Columbian businessman rebuilds it, leaving behind the sinful painting in the cellar waiting to crucify the next person in the same way.
Steering away from these red herrings, we are introduced to Sakshi (Anushka Shetty, a hearing-impaired painter who can't speak) and her fiancé, Anthony (Madhavan, eminent cellist) by a chirpy couple-in-a-car song. They are on their adventure to redeem the haunted painting for recreation.
Madhavan gets his early escape from the movie with the discovery of the painting and ends up getting plastered on the wall.
Just like the Among Us gameplay, right after fixing the sabotaged cellar lights, Anushka reports her fiancé’s dead body and calls for an emergency meeting to unravel the reason for his death.
Enter detective Anjali (Jogging to Brooklyn 99 theme music in her head and trying to be Amy Santiago of Seattle PD) investigating the case along with her captain named Richard Dawkins (Played by Michael Madsen, who is not out of the Tarantino hangover because he is always seen cracking mistimed jokes, computers, and television sets!).
When the trailer of the movie released, it popped up a curious case of a murder to which the witness is unable to speak and is hearing-impaired.
Seems like it's no big deal to Sakshi, who can use sign language, lip-read and effectively uses google translate to spill out every detail of the crime scene. (Released as a Tamil-Telugu bilingual, even the dialogues seem to have been translated with the help of google translate!)
With layers of every Hollywood thriller ever made, the screenplay follows a pattern of pitching out one twist at a time. The lead to every character is sketched merely for shock value, rather than creating any kind of coherence to the already zero logic story.
A plot point develops in the form of Sakshi's best friend Sonali (Shalini Pandey) who maintains a constant emotion of possessiveness. Third-wheeling on every date of Sakshi, she sabotages her tinder matches and even stabs a guy with a fork! (We feel the urge to be crucified to escape from her clutches!)
Madhavan continues his killing spree from the Breathe series (‘Silent claps’ for Madhavan for saving us from a cringe flashback portion with his polished performance).
With loud lip-sync issues, terrible performances from foreign actors and serious context struggles, Nishabdham leaves you dumbstruck even have the movie has ended.
Let us stand up and observe two minutes of "Silence" for Amazon prime, for banking on poor wannabe thrillers, instead of investing in fixing their search engine algorithm first.
Written by - Deepan R
Edited by - Ivanova
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