Breathe: Into the Shadows season 2 review: Abhishek Bachchan, Amit Sadh performances let down by implausible writing

Language: Hindi

Cast: Abhishek Bachchan, Amit Sadh, Nithya Menen, Naveen Kasturia, Saiyami Kher

Director: Mayank Sharma

In 2018, R. Madhavan and Amit Sadh headlined Amazon Prime Video’s much-anticipated new thriller Breathe, with every episode directed and co-written by Mayank Sharma. Sadh played an impulsive, egocentric cop going through a divorce, whereas Madhavan played a footballer-turned-murderer with a unique motivation — he’s killing off people who’re above his terminally ill son on an organ recipient list. The series had an intriguing premise, one rich in possibilities. The family drama could complement the serial killer hi-jinks nicely, provided the writing was dextrous enough to juggle the two genres. Sadly, Breathe lost steam midway through the season and bizarre, implausible writing decisions were to blame, for the most part.

Unfortunately for Mayank Sharma and Amit Sadh, the sequel series Breathe: Into the Shadows, featuring Abhishek Bachchan as a family man-turned-serial-killer, scarcely turned out better. Bachchan’s character, a psychiatrist called Dr Avinash Sabharwal, was revealed to have an alter ego, named ‘J’, who was the one carrying out the killings (and threatening Avinash that unless he helped, his daughter Siya—a juvenile diabetic—would be killed in captivity). The bizarre and implausible writing was even worse in Breathe: Into the Shadows, the second season of which began streaming on Amazon Prime Video on November 9 (Wednesday). Dr Avinash’s wife Abha readily accepts Avinash/J’s murder spree because “he was willing to do whatever it takes to save his family”. Now that’s a tough sell, even for the most naïve of audiences.

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Season 2 sees Dr Avinash escaping captivity, only to see a new psychopath (Victor, played by Naveen Kasturia) pulling the strings and threatening his family with dire consequences. The inexplicable story arcs begin from the first episode itself — J somehow convinces Abha that unless she kills a man (later revealed to be Victor’s abusive father) the nightmare her family went through last season would never truly be over. And within a day, Abha, a mild-mannered woman prone to aggressive bouts of nervousness, quite coolly plans and executes the perfect murder, staged to look like a suicide. There’s no explanation given as to how she has suddenly become so proficient at stalking, luring and finally killing a man in cold blood. And even in the immediate aftermath of the murder, she doesn’t really seem to be affected—doubly odd since the first season tended to view her as a moral centre of the story.

Similarly, Dr Avinash’s multiple personality disorder is used in a shamelessly convenient manner by the writers—sometimes, anger is the trigger that pushes him into becoming J, at other times he can sit through the most provoking taunts and feel nothing. Sometimes, he is extra affectionate with his family while on other times, even the Dr Avinash persona is shockingly abrasive with his wife and child (never mind J). It’s almost like the writers decided that the only way to depict mental illness is through randomness—if there are no behavior patterns, nobody can accuse them of getting the patterns wrong, right?

Amit Sadh’s brooding cop Kabir, meanwhile, floats through the season with an array of impressive stone-faced mini-glares. Sadh’s eyes, though, are wonderfully malleable. They can communicate hurt or anger or compassion with subtle shifts and on the whole, Sadh’s performance is a fine, naturalistic effort that deserved a vastly superior script. Ditto for Abhishek Bachchan, who tries his best to make sense of Dr Avinash/J for the audience’s sake. They both earn one star apiece from this review, taking the total score to 2/5.

But figuring out the heart of this screenplay is a puzzle too tedious even for Dr Avinash (who has some decent hunches about other people’s behavior, as you’d expect from a psychiatrist). A sample of the comically bad dialogue: Victor advises Dr Avinash/J in this way—“Aap bas dimaag thandaa rakho aur logon ko thandaa karte raho… Kill and chill!” That ‘Kill and Chill’ also happens to be the name of the episode in question makes this doubly bad—clearly, the writers thought they had something going with the juvenile rhyming of ‘kill’ and ‘chill’.

Naveen Kasturia is largely disappointing as the emasculated, traumatised new psychopath-on-the-block, Victor. At several points during the show, he tries to convey menace but ends up provoking laughter instead. I actually think he’s a really good actor in general, with loads of potential. But I also think he is woefully miscast here. The part needed somebody a bit younger, somebody with the right mixture of cherub and cold-blooded assassin vibes. Kasturia doesn’t really emanate either one of those vibes, if we’re being totally honest.

The rest of the ensemble cast does an adequate job of holding this thinly-sketched ship together—Ravi Behl (co-host and co-producer of the popular dance reality show Boogie Woogie) makes a rare appearance as Victor’s father Neel, a real estate baron who’s fond of parties and corporal punishment. But ultimately, the show and its cast are let down by some shockingly lazy dialogue as well as muddled-up plotting.

Breathe: Into the Shadows season 2 is streaming on Amazon Prime Video

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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