Rahul Desai
It’s a very ZEE5 film – yes, this is an adjective – in its treatment of the genre. The formula goes thus: It opens with a murder; ACP Avinash Verma (Bajpayee) and his Special Crimes Unit (SCU) go into elementary-my-dear-watson mode
The writing resorts to silly misdirection and redder-than-red herrings; the suspect is so blatantly designed that you know the actual killer will be random; the twist backpedals its way into the premise; it ends with the team sitting on a table and going “Yaar, what a case that was!”
At least 40 minutes of its 138 minutes have no reason to exist. The idea is that a ‘regular’ bar shootout in Mumbai – which causes the death of a politician – unlocks the presence of another crime: A human trafficking racket.
Without giving away more, let’s just say that Silence 2 continues the troubling trend of equating womanhood and/or queerness with mental instability. If such films weren’t so inane, they’d be offensive.
A parallel thread looks at the alleged mastermind of the racket. He speaks in a sing-song voice and ‘performs’ in an office whose whereabouts are supposed to be a mystery.
It’s a painfully basic rendition of a template that’s been milked dry by the Indian streaming space. And of course there’s the final revelation, where Avinash circles the killer and narrates his findings, even as a backstory from a different movie seems to hijack this one.