Shaque: Trust No One Review Rating:
Cast: Parineeti Chopra, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Harleen Sethi, Jennifer Winget, Soni Razdan, Anup Soni & others
Creator: Siddharth P Malhotra & Rensil D Silva
Director: Rensil D Silva
Streaming On: Netflix
Language: Hindi dubbed in English, Tamil, and Telugu
Runtime: 7 episodes of 40 minutes each
I am a fan of thrillers. Right from the time I was a child, my entire family was a fan of CID! I mean, there was a lot of thrill there, and when ACP Pradyuman used to say, Daya, Kuch To Gadbad Hai, everyone used to discuss, kya gadbad hai! Then I was introduced to the world of Sherlock Holmes, and this obsession with thrillers got better! In fact, in India, Vikash Swarup changed it once again with his book Six Suspects, and the thriller as a genre has been ruling the literature and the entertainment. Parineeti Chopra’s Netflix series Shaque dropped a brilliant teaser, and I was bowled and sold that this would be a great watch! But was it really? Honestly, yes, if you cut the suspense and take it out of the equation!
Created by Sidharth P Malhotra & Rensil D Silva, and directed by Rensil D Silva, this web series, streaming on Netflix, is an antithesis of a suspense thriller! From the very first 10 minutes, you figure out the entire plot! I mean, you do not need to be Sherlock to figure this out! The blueprint follows the usual trope – there is a cheating husband, a wife in self-doubt, a few unnecessary suspects, and the real culprit arriving mid-way to the colony/city, only to get linked with the place in the last episode!
Now, honestly, this is not that bad a plot, but the only issue is that it is an overused one! So, unless and until you have something new to offer, you are clearly watching the same trope again and again! Shaque tries to build a world with different subplots, but it’s all too scattered and never comes together to blend with the main kidnapping plot! Otherwise, this show had tremendous potential to keep you hooked with its plot!
Shaque: Trust No One Review: What’s It About:
Shaque: Trust No One follows Anvita (Parineeti Chopra), whose newborn daughter disappears from a hospital, only for a possible clue to surface nine years later, throwing suspicion on everyone in her circle – her husband, mother-in-law, friends, and neighbors alike. It’s a promising hook as the title of the show promises – Shaque: Trust No One! So, who has kidnapped Anvita’s newborn baby girl forms the premise of a seven-episode series, where you get to know who did it in probably the 2nd or third episode itself!
Rensil D Silva builds an entire Bhool Bhulaiyaa and hands you the master plan to this maze in the first episode itself! So basically, it is like The Traitors, you know who did it, you just have to wait to see how much time this protagonist takes to decode this! Meanwhile, you just have to keep pretending surprised at every twist, praying Oh, God, let me be wrong with my answer and let this turn interesting! But Cinema Gods cannot help a bad script ever!
Shaque: Trust No One Review: What Works:
Parineeti Chopra’s show manages to create a world. The plot is good! Suspects are plenty and the run time does not ever bother you! The pacing of the show is brilliant, and that is why it works to some extent despite knowing Who Has Done It, in this shaky whodunit! And probably, this is the show’s saving grace, that it does not let you get bored! It is fast, even while it is failing to trick you! Luckily, it does not offend your common sense with its pace!
Shaque: Trust No One Review: Star Performance:
Whatever the writing does to her, Parineeti Chopra‘s desperation as a mother who has spent nine years refusing to grieve about her lost daughter works! She gives the series a convincing emotional center, and it’s genuinely her conviction here that keeps you hooked to her journey! Harleen Sethi, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Soni Razdan, Anup Soni, and Sumeet Vyas merely act as a very crooked external cast that does nothing much to create intrigue and distrust! None of them looks like the culprit!
In fact, I had a lot of hope from Bhasin-Harleen’s subtle track, but only if their limited material could walk out of the kisses and intimacy to do some real work here! Jennifer Winget‘s entry in the second or third episode with that Beyhadh streak works like a charm for this series, which could not be shouldered by Parineeti alone!
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Shaque: Trust No One Review: What Doesn’t Work:
The bigger issue with the show is its subplots – there is black magic, an illegal surrogacy business, a murder, an extramarital affair, a revenge drama, a cop dealing with cancer, tarot sessions, and all of them could be disposed of with a flush! None of these plots survives due to the thin writing that goes through a suspense crisis here! While all of these plots had immense potential to thicken the plot, they dilute it disastrously! I mean, clearly, the only game the writer does not win at a table is the game of bluff!
Even the show’s own shots, frames, dialogues, and the background music do absolutely nothing to add to the tension! The title says everyone is guilty, but you do not believe it from the first frame. In fact, after a point, Soni Razdan‘s mother-in-law starts irritating me, for the good or the bad, I can’t figure out! But the saas bahu drama here works better than the Sherlock suspense!
Shaque: Trust No One Review: Last Words:
Shaque wants to be a slow-burn thriller about the people you trust most, but it forgets that the slow-burn requires actually hiding the fire. The problem with the show is that it is not smart enough! It forgets the golden rule of investigative dramas – the mystery should keep the audience in doubt till the end. The core failure here is not protecting the identity of the culprit till the last hook! A mystery thriller’s entire connection with its audience is to make you doubt your own readings, but you will be more than confident about how this is going to end! If ACP Pradyuman were investigating this case, he’d have wrapped it before the interval. Because, clearly, he would not even get a chance to say, Daya kuch to gadbad hai! To be honest, yahan kuch bhi gadbad nahi hai! The show will leave you feeling like the quickest Sherlock Holmes in history simply because there was no riddle to solve in the first place!
2.5 stars
For more web series reviews, stay tuned to Koimoi.
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