Shaque: Trust No One Review: A Psychological Thriller That Tests Your Patience

Rajkumari Sharma Tankha

Shaque – Trust No One, the Netflix India new web series, wants to be a psychological thriller. It has secrets, suspicion, a troubled marriage, a dysfunctional home, a mysterious woman, a picturesque hill town and enough ominous background music to make you believe something terribly exciting is about to happen. The problem is, nothing happens!

Though this Hindi web series on Netflix starts with enough intrigue to make you stay, it quickly loses its grip. By the middle, you are no longer asking, “Who is hiding what?” You are asking, “How many episodes are left?”

A promising premise, but a predictable plot

This seven-episode psychological crime drama follows the life of Anvita (played by Parineeti Chopra), a woman whose new-born daughter is stolen from the hospital bed. The needle of suspicion falls on everyone, including Anvita’s mother-in-law (played by Soni Razdan) and her childhood friend Shreya (Harleen Sethi).

The series fast forwards to a birthday celebration nine years later. Anvita is shown celebrating her missing daughter’s birthday when she receives a packet containing pics of her missing daughter. She then begins a hunt for her missing daughter again. How she finally manages to trace her is what this story is all about.

Nothing wrong with the plot, though there is nothing new either.

What is mind-boggling is that Anvita is so fixated on her first daughter that she totally neglects her second child – again a daughter. Normally, a woman would get more devoted to the second child after losing first. But, here we have Anvita who is least bothered about her second daughter.

A family full of secrets and questionable relationships

While the title does say Trust No One, it seems a bit unrealistic when you show everyone in the family and friends against Anvita, except the lone police officer Inspector Khurana (played by Anup Soni) who is investigating the case.

The director has thrown in things like illegal surrogacy, black magic and tarot reading to build intrigue in this story, but fails miserably. There is no content built around these things, hence no depth. Why the mentions?

Anvita and the cop are the only two persons interested in finding the missing baby. Not even the father of her child Alok (played by Tahir Raj Bhasin) is interested in finding her. That’s something very strange.

What’s stranger is that while his wife is kind-of-depressed, and he has another small daughter at home, the man is busy in an extra-marital relationship with none other than his wife’s best friend! Neither the friend nor the husband has any guilt about it. The friend’s husband Dr Bhasker (played by Sumit Vyas) knows about it but he ‘loves’ his wife so much that he is okay with it. The man’s mom (Soni Razdan) knows and welcomes it. Soni Razdan’s character tests your patience. She is annoying, to say the least. Not intriguing-annoying. Just annoying-annoying.

One wonders, what kind of family and friends does Anvita have?

Jennifer is Sakshi Or Maya?

The story moves dully around these topics, and then arrives Sakshi (played by Jennifer Winget), and you think now the story will pick up, but NO. While it is true that Jennifer Winget is the only good thing about Shaque: Trust No One, the directors have failed to bring out a doting mother they want to portray her as.

Jennifer is still in her Maya (her character in Beyhadd) frame of mind –  a psychotic woman who will do anything for someone who she loves. She is the one who stole Anvita’s daughter to take revenge on Alok & Shreya, who she thinks were responsible for the death of her unborn child. She commits suicide in the end.

Performances that fail to create an emotional connect

All in all, Shaque: Trust No One feels like a stretched-out thriller- listless and boring. Parineeti Chopra’s performance is difficult to defend. She can’t act for nuts. Her emotional scenes feel forced and rehersed. She has not been able to portray any of her parts well – seeing her one cannot feel the pain of a mother who has lost her child nor the pain of a wife whose husband is cheating on her with her best friend, nor a betrayed friend. The crying in the opening episode, which should pull a viewer into the character’s emotional world, feels strangely forced, hence odd and irritating. That’s what she is through the entire film. Anvita is a broken women but, Parineeti has not been able to bring out her anxieties and fears or even despair to the fore. She fails to make an emotional connect with the viewers.

And, that’s the last thing you want in a psychological thriller.

Questions the Shaque team needs to answer

In the end, I have a few questions for Shaque: Trust No One team:

What message did you want to convey when you showed an eight-month pregnant woman driving alone from Delhi to Shimla, that too at night. Is this your way of showing women-empowerment? Actually, it is being foolish.

What is this fixation for hill station for setting up a thriller? Do crimes not happen in other towns and big cities? India, surely, has enough real stories, real towns and real social contradictions to create hundreds of thrillers without making every crime story look like it needs a mountain backdrop.

And what exactly happened to Inspector Khurana? The way he died suddenly – shown as some supernatural doing. But what is it?

What exactly is Dr Bhasker’s specialisation? Is he a gynec or an oncologist?