Silence: Can You Hear It? Hindi Movie
The Rashomon Effect is a situation where different individuals give different versions of one event. Neither the audience nor the other characters could easily determine who is telling the truth. Numerous thrillers revolve around the Kurosawa Effect. Zee5's 'Silence: Can You Hear It' is the latest film that adds to the long list of such whodunit movies.
The film begins with the discovery of young Pooja Choudhari's corpse by trekkers in an isolated area outdoors. The makers waste little time in establishing the fact that Pooja is murdered. She last went to her best friend Kavita's home where there was only her husband Ravi Khanna (Arjun Mathur). As a local politician, Khanna himself is coping with the accident of his wife that led her to comatose. She fell when coming down a flight of stairs soon after Khanna entered their home at about the same time as Pooja's death. But Khanna says that he forgot about Pooja amid his wife's situation. Is he telling the truth, or covering up a big lie?
The father of Pooja, retired Justice Chaudhary, wants nothing but justice for his daughter. So, he demands what he feels is the best man for the job, Manoj Bajpayee's ACP Avinash Verma. The ACP is a hard-nosed encounter specialist with scant regard for the law of the nation. So, Denzel Smith's Commissioner Sanjay Sharma hesitantly puts Verma on the case while warning him against any illegal activity, knowing his relationship with the law. Verma must solve the mystery at the heart of the case before he runs out of time.
Verma knows that it would not be easy as some witnesses hide the truth, whereas the others give a true version of the events. All he has to crack the case is some circumstantial evidence as well as a competent yet young team of inspectors.
Silence has all the trappings of a usual whodunit genre thriller. The makers tell the story with some deliberately misleading clues and convenient plot elements added to make the suspense more interesting. Writer-director Aban Bharucha Deohans keeps the pace of the movie steady, and he extracts a fine performance from Bajpayee. But he does not quite aim for a film that lies beyond the serviceable territory. I found the explanation for the murder a tad too convenient, and the climax a bit underwhelming.
The killer says that what happened was an accident, but when the actual event comes around, we would realize that that is not quite true. Anyhow, you could still watch the whole thing unfold thanks to Bajpayee, who infuses the part with equal amounts of charm, seriousness and wit. Prachi Desai as Inspector Sanjana Bhatia is only a mere eye-candy. The rest of the supporting cast, meanwhile, is only there for fill-up roles.
If you have seen several suspense thrillers, then Silence may be familiar material to you. If it is one of your first few suspect thrillers, however, it may turn out to be an entertaining diversion for you. It has a serviceable plot, plus a commendable song-less approach to filmmaking.
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