Review- Silence (Tamil) on Amazon Prime Video

SILENCE (Tamil) Producer-T.G. Vishwa Prasad

Director-= Hemant Madhukar

Star Cast- R. Madhavan, Anushka Shetty, Anjali, Shalini Pandey, Subbaraju and Michael Madsen

Genre- Thriller

Rating- **

Boring and Trite!

(Beaming on Amazon Prime Video as a Direct to Stream)

Jyothi Venkatesh

Broadly speaking, this film has been adapted from the silent film Pushpakavimanam and is about how Anthony Gonsalves (Madhavan), a celebrated cellist, and his fiancée Sakshi (Anushka Shetty), a speech-and-hearing challenged artist, go to a house for their honeymoon. Unfortunately, the abode is believed to be haunted — one where a young couple were mysteriously killed in 1972 (the film opens with a prologue involving their murders) — so that she can pick up a rare painting. However, Anthony ends up being killed — in the same manner as the guy in 1972 — while an injured Sakshi, who has managed to flee the place, is hospitalised.

The plot is about how a not-so-fiery lady cop from Seattle Maha (Anjali) who tries to crack the case. As Maha and her boss Richard Dawkins (Michael Madsen) investigate, they hit a wall as Anthony seems to have no foes. And then, Maha stumbles on a photo of the couple with Sonali (Shalini Pandey), Maha’s childhood friend, who has been missing even before Anthony’s murder and sets out to infer if there is a connection between her disappearance and the crime.

Though one is told that Silence is a Tamil film, it seems like it is a Telugu film dubbed in Tamil and not an original one. While the writing by Hemant has hardly any merit, performance by each and every one is just about average. While Anushka Shetty does have screen presence, R. Madhavan seems to be just about disinterested in the proceedings and conveniently is knocked off. Anjali is good in her short role while Michael Madsen who was appreciated for his performances in films like Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill simply leaves a lot to be desired as far as acting is concerned. Instead of evoking terror in the viewer, he is reduced to being just a caricature. You seem to lose interest in the film, from the time the male protagonist is killed off, that too for no rhyme or reason half way through the otherwise insipid which just fails to engage you and is to put it bluntly boring

The biggest problem with the film Silence is that it tries so hard to Americanise a just about run-of-the-mill script, cast American actors, and unnecessarily set the story in Seatle, and hoping to invoke a 'different' feeling. For all you may know, the story could have even been set in Khandala or Matheran and yet all that we could have got in return after watching the film is the sound of silence. The Tamil dubbed version Silence as well as the original Telugu version 'Nishabdham' both have two songs throughout the film, which could have been easily avoided

To sum up, all that I’d say is that you see the film on Amazon Prime Video only If you are a die-hard fan of either R Madhavan or Anushka Shetty or just choose to go back and watch Anushka starrer 'Bhagamathie' and the R. Madhavn starrer 'Vikram Vedha' to keep yourself engrossed because this one just bores you to death, with an insipid plot.