Review Of Nishabdam: It Leaves You Speechless(For All The Wrong Reasons)

Nishabdam(Amazon Prime  Video )

Starring Madhavan, Anushka Shetty

Directed  by  Hemant Madhukar

Rating: *

The most offensive  aspect  of  Nishabdam 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?

Nishab-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 Nishabdam , 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. H e 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 Madesen)looks  more suspicious than Anushka Shetty  ever can. To  Madsen  goes  the credit  for  one of the worst  performance 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 Nishabdam will continue to haunt the lead  actor’s careers  for a long time.