Nishabdham (Amazon Prime Video )
Starring Madhavan, Anushka Shetty
Directed by Hemant Madhukar
Rating: *
The most offensive aspect of Nishabdham is that is doesn’t know how offensive it’s being. For example, there is a sequence in an art gallery where the mute and deaf heroine(Anushka Shetty) is introduced to a charmed man who gets instantly smitten saying, “I also have a brother who is deaf and dumb.”
Well, if you sign on for something so dumb then you deserve dialogues which are not only politically inappropriate but also unbearably tactless. Who speaks of the physically impaired in such loud interjectory whispers?
Nishan-dumb leaves you speechless. For all the wrong reasons. The plot is so ridiculously pernicious and dull and the direction so incredibly incompetent you wonder why actors of the stature of Madhavan and Anushka Shetty signed up for the self-demeaning project! Maybe sometimes respected actors crave to do something so disrespectful as to make their fans angry.
Before you sign up to watch Nishabdham , be warned. This is not an easy film to sit through or condone for its witless storytelling which involves a heroine who can’t speak and can’t show she’s an effective actress(there are so many others in the cast who would feel despondently inadequate) and a hero who plays the cello when he is in the mood to be murdered.
Be warned again. The cello has never been a cinema-friendly instrument. The last time I saw the protagonist playing the cello it was in Subhash Ghai’s Yuvraj . And we all know what happened to Salman Khan in it.Madhavan fares even worse. He is bumped off in the first ten minutes in a most gruesome manner while his deaf and “dumb” wife is the prime suspect.
The officer on duty Richard(Michael Madsen)looks more suspicious than Anushka Shetty ever can. To Madsen goes the credit for one of the worst performances by a screen cop. The supporting cast of Caucasian actors seems to have picked off from the streets.The cop doing the investigation speaks his lines as though they were being fed to him from a whimsical printer.
And I could swear the faces at Anushka’s orphanage showed up a little later at her art exhibition. Sloppy, and lacking in all claims to finesse the ghost in Nishabdham will continue to haunt the lead actor’s careers for a long time.
