Shaque: Trust No One Review: A Toothless, Dull Missing-Child Thriller

Shaque Trust No One Netflix review

BOTTOM LINE
A Toothless, Dull Missing-Child Thriller

PLATFORM
NETFLIX

RUNTIME
4Hrs 25Mins [7 Episodes]

What Is the Show About?

Anvita, married to her college sweetheart Alok, has just delivered a baby girl. However, her joy is short-lived when the infant mysteriously disappears overnight. Years later, Anvita goes on to become a mother to another child. Yet to fully heal from her past, she continues to celebrate the birthday of her lost baby and keeps receiving haunting images of a growing girl.

Performances

Gone are the days when you actually felt for Parineeti Chopra not getting her due in Hindi cinema. When she repeatedly finds her way into mediocre outings, you suspect if there was any strong motivation beyond a good paycheque. Jennifer Winget gets a few moments to shine despite the poor writing. Tahir Raj Bhasin, Soni Razdan and Sumeet Vyas are handed half-baked roles. Harleen Sethi and Anup Soni fare slightly better among the rest.

Analysis

Shaque: Trust No One, out on Netflix, is a small-town mystery revolving around Anvita, a traumatised mother relentless in her pursuit of a child who vanished on the very day she was born. While everyone around her gives up on finding the baby, she joins forces with a determined police officer, only to be plagued by repeated setbacks and harrowing psychotic episodes.

Suspicious characters lurk all around. A husband is entangled in an affair with his wife’s best friend. A mother-in-law, unhappy with her daughter-in-law, discreetly believes in black magic. A medico is drawn into a surrogacy scam to make easy money and please his cheating wife. What connects them to a missing child? The world sets out to prove Anvita is the one at fault.

The writing is generic at various levels, more so with its one-note characters sans any depth or strong identity, ranging from a grieving mother to a grumpy mother-in-law, a gaslighting husband, a disloyal best friend and an earnest cop. Motherhood is painted as the biggest achievement in the life of a woman, something that solely defines her. It’s convenient that all roles in the show, but for the mother and the cop, come with misguided intentions.

It’s also problematic that it paints the tribals in its setting in a poor light, as a backward lot ready to go to any length for money and blindly believe in superstitions. The narrative is too one-dimensional, with Anvita’s hunt making you stop caring for her plight or her illusions after a point. All that the makers were looking for is a way to delay the inevitable, forcing in at least a dozen twists, which don’t even lead to a meaningful resolution.

The show, from start to finish, lacks freshness with its flabby treatment of a done-to-death idea. There’s no uniqueness to the portrayal of the hill-station backdrop, any fillip on the technical front, or any strong performances. The motives of the characters are quite primitive and the character evolution is nearly non-existent. The lacklustre screenplay is caught between drowning you in slumber and suddenly claiming your attention the very next moment.

As a missing-child thriller, Shaque neither possesses emotional gravitas nor a complex mystery. The show is needlessly convoluted despite its wafer-thin plot, time and again hammering the same point across different sequences over its four-hour duration. A ridiculously simple climax only leaves you cheated as a viewer, making you wonder what the fuss was about.

Shaque is a waste of talent and resources and, most importantly, doesn’t deserve your time.

Music and Other Departments?

The technical contributions are as functional as the writing and the performances. The background score adds no real value to the proceedings, treading a very obvious path to amplify the mystery and rare moments of thrill. Jishnu Bhattacharya’s cinematography lacks any distinctive appeal. The show may have worked better as a crisp two-hour film over a series, which would have given it a better chance to mask its shortcomings. With formidable names like Siddharth Malhotra and Rensil De Silva in the production, it’s only fair to expect a better product.

Highlights?

Rare moments of thrill

Few twists

Jennifer Winget, Anup Soni’s performances

Drawbacks?

A dull Parineeti Chopra

Poor writing, weak screenplay

Unconvincing climax

Did I Enjoy It?

Not quite

Will You Recommend It?

Even if you’re a thriller junkie, stay a safe distance away from it

Shaque: Trust No One Series Reviewed by M9 News