STORY
The entertainment journalists in Mumbai are haunted in the mist of terrifying clouds when a serial killer is on lose brutally killing only film critics to whom the killer finds passing dishonest film reviews. Inspector Arvind Mathur is assigned to catch him and stop the madness.
INTRODUCTION
‘Chup: Revenge of the Artist‘ is a crime thriller. Two factors propelled me to watch this film. One was that R. Balki directed it who already has entertained us in the past directing some interesting films like Cheeni Kum, Paa, and Pad Man. The other reason is that Sunny Deol starred in it. When Sunny paaji stars, the general audience understands that the film is going to be an action-packed thriller with our He-Man smashing every possible existence throughtout the universe in larger-than-life fighting sequences. But this pick surprised me. So I was interested to know how R. Balki and Sunny Deol collaborate in such an interesting plot.
REVIEW
Almost forty minutes in the film, I felt the story was running in haste. The scenes were short and the dust of investigation was not settling. When you make a crime investigative film, the first forty minutes are the storyteller’s borrowed time to build an interesting crime case to the audience.
The dialogues are surprisingly boring. The leads towards the case are interesting but I just cannot feel myself flowing towards the screenplay because Balki’s direction throughout the film is ordinary.
The love angle of Danny and Nila is unusual due to their mutual interests but boring start of their knowing each other because of unnatural coincidences.
The film falls flat in the second half. Despite having so much potential to give a better conclusion of the case, the quality writing was terribly missing. And one major reason for a disappointing continuity was the revelation of the culprit in the first half of the film. The nature of the case and the whole screenplay pretty much gave an impression to me and surely to everyone who watched the film that Chup will be a suspense crime-thriller with our jaws dropping out in the final scenes. But in the first hour, the makers of the film gave us no chills to guess the person in quest and drop some obvious hints that led to disappointment.
And then average performances. I got to see Pooja Bhatt in a film in ages. Her character looked promising but had not much contribution due to extremely less screen presence. Sunny Deol was okay but Dulquer Salmaan as the maniac in the hunt was disappointing. He is a good actor but this role was not his. That craziness of cutting people and spreading their blood as an art, you need a special romance in those psycho eyes. And that was missing in Dulquer Salmaan. If I was the director of this film, I would have picked either Ranveer Singh or Rajkummar Rao.
The film also suffers from plotholes and I had to question if Balki really was directing all this. There is a mistake in two same murder sequences with the lady feeding her cat where at the same angle, we see the killer walking out from behind but in the previous sequence, the killer wasn’t. Whereas the camera angle was same.
Danny throws Nila from the third or fourth floor of the building and believe it or not, Nila survives with blood on her face. She was thrown on the path, on the hard surface. How come she survived with her head visibly hit on the path with that force? Even Arvind Mathur jumped from that height and dropped down with a leg injury. How come Danny not hear a wheel cart on the rail track coming towards them?
GURU DUTT
Chup is an obvious and ardent tribute to the legendary filmmaker, Guru Dutt. The sound that is repeatedly used in the background, the old songs, and a few scenes in the film especially the studio scene are all the prestigious references of Guru Dutt’s cinematic artistry. Shaping a villainous character’s origins inspired from Guru Dutt’s real-life melancholy over a failure of his film is the biggest plus of the film. I liked the idea where I need to look at Guru Dutt’s angle, what if he had turned a killer of all the people who disliked his cult classic ‘Kaaghaz Ke Phool‘?
CLOSING REMARKS
The story of Chup is easily one of the best of 2022 Bollywood but a failure to give justice through direction and screenplay.
RATINGS 4/10
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Sami Naik | Film Critic 