Masoom Review: Uneven but wicked enough to be called rewarding

In the 4th episode of the Disney+Hotstar series Masoom , Monty, the childhood friend of our protagonist Sanaa, has littered the floor of his house with photographs and documents. “Maine socha dekhu mere bhi koi secrets hain yaa meri tarah meri family bhi boring thi”, he says. Monty has recently lost his father, and in an episode titled ‘Family Secrets’ makes a tidy inside joke about the number of broken films that continue to make for great entertainment. Masoom is the spirit equivalent of Sony Liv’s brilliant Tabbar, but while the latter confronted external demons in an attempt to keep the family together, Masoom is deals with the ruins within. A family where trust and dependability has evaporated to the point that all that all that remains is an air of despondence and suspicion. Set in Punjab, Masoom is deliciously wicked but doesn’t quite hit the performative brilliance of Tabbar . Samara Tijori plays Sanaa, the daughter who returns to her hometown in Punjab to attend to her mother’s funeral. Washed up and perpetually anxious Sanaa has never been close to her family, especially her overbearing yet distant father, the excellent Boman Irani . Irani, to most, is doctor sahib, a native saint known for his philanthropic lifestyle. But below the sheen of this selflessness there is a complex human being that the show teases as the mystery itself. Sanaa believes her mother was murdered, and wants to investigate it with the help of brother Monty, to a lesser extent by her brother and elder sister. Irani on the other hands plays his tough-to-figure patriarch with ease. He is delightfully restrained and spookily without a telling facial expression. Irani controls his character’s emotional range to perfection, never letting the audience a sniff of what could or is. Masoom is also well-layered. Sanaa’s childhood friend Monty, is a reassuringly calm presence amidst the violence and tension, while her brother’s own twisted secrets, lend the family a layer of farce that only heightens the tension in the script’s bones. Sanaa, herself has a childhood burden of abuse to deal with and it is right in front of her, in the form of her uncle. In one scene he stands naked in front of her, with the boorishness of a criminal who knows he is beyond reproach. It’s a chillingly discomforting scene but it feeds into Sanaa’s character, as perhaps the reason she looks ponderous and lost most of the time. Sanaa sees a mental health counsellor, and often her ability to sense asymmetry is rejected as a result of her reluctance to attend her ‘sessions’. It’s a bitter and brutal world, and the sultry, grim corners of a Punjabi town, add to the show’s dreariness. The problem with Masoom is that is that none of its elements or pivots are actually revelatory. Or at least they don’t feel like it. Secrets are shared so randomly and openly without the virtuous hesitance of characters occupying a poisonous, limiting environment. Strangely, it’s not the scenes that reveal something that feel odd but the ones in which opinions are shared or conveyed. In one scene, Sanaa randomly walks into the police station to ask for her mother’s death to be investigated. In another she declares to her siblings, rather nonchalantly that she believes their father killed their mother. I mean, they are all their father’s children, so maybe show some guile in approaching a declaration as sweeping or as audacious. The show has its moments, but they are almost always undermined by sequences where characters act without a filter, as if they’ve been written without an education of the world they are set in. It pulls the tension down remarkably. Sure characters can act naïve, but to have no sense of subtlety in a show that actually certain subtexts well, is jarring, and frankly, annoying. That said, Masoom, which is another in a long line of Hotstar’s adaptations (based on an Irish series) is a worthy peer of Tabbar without quite hitting the latter’s heights. Performance wise Irani does justice to the complexity of his character, and everyone else is acceptable in their bits. Tijori largely struggles to carry the emotional churn that Sanaa has put up with, but doesn’t exactly drop the ball in what is a tough character to essay – both traumatised and brave. Masoom struggles in its ability to hinge its pace and substance on a mystery that is in the bigger scheme of things the precursor for a lot more to be revealed. The issue this revelatory cycle is often hit and miss, executed with the unevenness of a script that really doesn’t know what its biggest hook really is. It’s not Tabbar, but _Masoom i_s still a deliciously wild and gory view of the great Indian family as the source of much of our dread. Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.