Shaque: Trust No One has a promising mystery and enough juicy red herrings to keep you guessing, but its convenient writing and dated clichés eventually derail the show, observes Sreeju Sudhakaran.
IMAGE: Parineeti Chopra and Tahir Raj Bhasin in Shaque: Trust No One.
Key Points
- Parineeti Chopra stars as Anvita, a mother desperately searching for her baby kidnapped eight years prior, while battling hallucinations and mental disturbances.
- The series, created by Rensil D’Silva and Siddharth P Malhotra, attempts a Harlan Coben-esque mystery but is hampered by a contrived screenplay and convenient plot devices.
- Anup Soni as Officer Khurana and Jennifer Winget as Sakshi deliver notable performances, but the overall direction and writing are described as dated and melodramatic.
Parineeti Chopra returns to our screens after a two-year gap with the mystery drama series Shaque: Trust No One.
The title instantly reminds you of those movies that once proudly flaunted subtitle taglines simply because the filmmakers then really… I mean… really cared for the English medium students and wanted them to know exactly what the title conveyed.
So we used to have these glorious movie names like Dhund: The Fog, Shart: The Challenge, Jaal: The Trap, Nayak: The Real Hero, and Shakti: The Power.
But there is one movie tagline that still confounds me nearly three decades later: Daag: The Fire. What do stains have to do with fire? Or was the title originally Aag, and someone accidentally added a ‘D’ before realising it sounded way catchier because it made absolutely no sense?
The Mystery Of The Missing Baby
Sorry, sorry… I digress. Let me return to Shaque: Trust No One, a show where you are explicitly not supposed to trust any character because the title insists you shouldn’t. That includes the protagonist herself, simply because she could possibly be mentally disturbed and keeps hallucinating.
Actually, there is one person you can trust, someone the show keeps forgetting to put on the suspicion radar, Officer Khurana. Played with enough amiability by Anup Soni, Khurana almost becomes the show’s protagonist before the makers remembered who is actually supposed to be Shaque‘s biggest headliner.
Parineeti plays Anvita, whose baby is mysteriously kidnapped while she recuperates in the hospital post-delivery. She and her husband Advit (Tahir Raj Bhasin) hold on to the hope that they will get their child back someday.
That hope never extinguishes, even after they have a second child, and Anivita celebrates the missing girl’s birthday every year. Perhaps to taunt them, the kidnapper sends pictures on that exact day every year to prove their daughter is still alive.
Anvita also promises a Rs 15 lakh reward to anyone offering information about the child’s whereabouts. But much like a certain other Rs 15 lakh that was once promised in this country, not a single person in the show actually gets the amount.
The main story kicks off eight years after the abduction. Anvita is still desperately hunting for her child, and the only other person showing genuine interest in solving the mystery is Officer Khurana.
He has been actively investigating the case for eight years. But the bigger mystery is why he has been posted in Shimla for eight years straight. And how does he have all the time in the world to spend on this single case?
Okay, I am exaggerating slightly here. He handles other cases too, but call it the maya of the universe, they all somehow circle back to Anvita and her missing baby.
Also, Officer Khurana can read Tarot cards and firmly insists the cards never lie. Well, is there an answer in those cards about who took the baby? We could save everyone a lot of time here.
A Passably Captivating Mystery
Shaque: Trust No One is created by Rensil D’Silva (Kurbaan, Ungli) and Siddharth P Malhotra (Hichki, Maharaj, Ikka), with D’Silva writing and directing the entire seven-episode series.
There is a very Harlan Coben vibe to the show’s mystery about a gloomy mother desperately searching for her missing child that definitely holds your attention. It is a theme that has anchored plenty of onscreen thrillers, most recently the Emmy-nominated series All Her Fault.
Shaque carries the mystery almost attentively through its handful of juicy red herrings. Anvita’s husband is a shifty dude carrying on an affair with her best friend Shreya (Harleen Sethi).
Shreya herself is married to Bhaskar (Sumeet Vyas), who is also Advit’s friend and happens to be the doctor at the hospital where the baby was abducted, and yes, he also has his own bundle of dark secrets.
Anvita’s mother-in-law Madhu (Soni Razdan) dabbles in black magic and has a shady deal going on with a dodgy baba living in the forest. We even get mentions of the illegal child trade and tribal practices.
The trauma of losing her child, combined with the unintentional ingestion of spiked drinks, makes Anvita hallucinate at times. She starts believing every eight-year-old girl she meets is her daughter.
Compounding her suspicions, a new couple, Sakshi (Jennifer Winget) and Gaurav (Dhruv Chaudhary), moves to Shimla. Their daughter is the exact same age Anvita’s child would be today. So, is their daughter actually hers, or is Anvita’s head just playing tricks on her better sense again?
The answers to the mystery seem fairly obvious, especially when it is so easy to pick out the red herrings who are deliberately painted as the shiftiest of the lot. You just know they have dirty secrets to hide, just not the ones crucial to the main kidnapping.
A Convenient Screenplay
What pins Shaque hard to the ground is not the mystery itself, but the contrived way the screenplay keeps forcing it forward. Rensil D’Silva sets up enough red herrings to make you curious, but then dismantles them through a series of increasingly convenient revelations.
That becomes particularly frustrating because Shaque: Trust No One has a decent workable hook. An eight-year-old kidnapping, a traumatised mother who cannot trust her own perceptions, an investigator obsessed with the case and a new family whose daughter could potentially be hers are all ingredients for a gripping thriller.
Instead, Shaque keeps choosing the most convenient route to its next twist. The result is a mystery that asks you to keep guessing while repeatedly giving you reasons to stop believing in the investigation altogether.
Suspects suddenly launch into full confessions at the slightest confrontation, characters freely hand the cops crucial information they have no reason to reveal, and major breakthroughs arrive long after the evidence that should have triggered them has already been sitting in plain sight. The mystery works only as long as you do not stop to question how anyone is actually solving it.
For instance, Khurana gets hold of missing CCTV footage, but it is only much later that he stumbles upon the crucial detail that provides his major breakthrough. What he and his entire team were doing with that footage until then is a mystery unto itself. He is also constantly accompanied by his loyal junior, but at the most crucial juncture, he refuses to confide in him and heads out to confront a couple of suspects alone.
My understanding of the Indian police system is not exactly airtight, but do you not need female constables or officers present to interrogate or arrest female suspects?
Also, why would an illegally obtained DNA report be officially used by the police to nail the culprits?
And why did those culprits never once think to contest such a shadily obtained document?
These are not clever misdirections. They are screenplay shortcuts designed to delay information until the show is ready to reveal it with the right people in the spotlight. And that is ultimately Shaque‘s biggest problem. It wants the audience to ‘trust no one’, but the person you end up distrusting the most is the writer.
Parineeti Gives A Sense Of Deja Vu
If I wish my disappointment was simply in the convenient manner in which the screenplay solves the mystery; it is also in how eagerly it embraces tired clichés. We get the standard extramarital affair, an MIL who hates her son’s wife for no damn good reason and a character suddenly revealed to be suffering from cancer.
My shaque is that this ‘nostalgically titled’ show also wants to deliver a dated ‘nostalgia’ feel through its lazy writing.
If D’Silva’s writing feels antiquated in places, his direction never offers any compensatory spark. At best, you can call his treatment serviceable. At worst, it plays out like a melodramatic Spanish soap opera.
As for Parineeti Chopra, she finds herself in a space we have already seen her occupy before: a woman constantly gaslit by the people closest to her, caught in a head-scratching crime involving everyone she knows and who may not have a very reliable POV because of her emotional trauma.
Unfortunately, much like her remake of The Girl On The Train, this new outing simply boards the ‘okay’ train and shakily rattles along until it finally bumps into its endpoint.
Shaque: Trust No One streams on Netflix.
Shaque: Trust No One Review Rediff Rating:
