An Unwitting Parody
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. There’s also a long-drawn and cringey sequence in Rajasthan, where a group of young virgins dressed in sleeping-beauty attire are abused at a rowdy bachelor party. It looks like the sort of Seventies’ sexploitation flick that unwittingly parodies itself. The sloppiness is surreal, for instance when Avinash’s personal life is reduced to a single moment of him speaking on the phone while drinking whiskey in his new apartment. The story could’ve riffed on his loneliness and dysfunctional-detective ways, but it’s too busy turning Mumbai into a colourless gimmick. There is no sense of place, time or rhythm; all that matters is that someone is bad and we don’t know who it is. 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.
The film also features Prachi Desai as Avinash’s subordinate. This sentence has no value unless you’ve survived Forensic (2022), another ZEE5 shocker – starring Vikrant Massey and Prachi Desai – with the most farcical twist in the history of movie twists. Desai’s character here is so incidental that it almost feels like Silence 2 is atoning for the sins of Forensic. Unimaginative plots often use men (and the casting of these actors) as a hollow smokescreen, and Silence 2 goes as far as compromising on its own craft – lighting, staging and framing shots badly – so that the identity of the killer remains (literally) blurred. If Arjun Mathur was the hammy front in the first film, this time it’s Dinker Sharma – a promising actor trapped in the role of a deranged Shakespearean artist whose ‘scenes’ bring to mind Nirmal Pandey’s histrionics from One 2 Ka 4 (2001) and Jitin Gulati’s trans extravagance in Kaala (2023). The commitment to camp is admirable but misguided.
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. As I write this, the prospect of a “Forensic Silence” multiverse just dawned upon me. The crime to be solved would revolve around a movie franchise that poisons its viewers by making them watch otherwise-fine performers phone it in together. It’s a hard case. After all, there are multiple suspects and copycat killers.