Khamoshh Review

Khamoshh is a film about a person who has a split personality. Before we start, a small question to test our readers' general knowledge: What are the top things that you can do if you have a split personality?

a. put it up for sale on ebay
b. read everything twice and therefore be well-read
c. bill your client for 2 persons everytime you dine out
d. sign up the "other guy" for the gym
e. kill people you don't like and blame it on the other guy

The correct reply, of course, is "e". Yes, if Bollywood is any indication, the only thing that people with split personalities do is go around hacking people to death - there must be more split personality murderers in Bollywood films than there are people in the world with split personalities (even counting Zaheera Sheikh). Now if only Bollywood would also remember that not a single one of these films has worked - Indian audiences like their characters whole.

The film starts with a clutch of unrelated people landing up at a motel on a deserted highway, on a dark, rainy night. Sonia (Shilpa Shetty) is a girl whose car has broken down, and she is asking passing vehicles for a lift, since she has seen people do it in the movies. Avinash (Rajiv Singh) stops since he generally finds it hard not to help another human being. Also, Sonia is all drenched, her already tiny clothes are clinging to her body revealing outlines of her one-size-too-small undergarments, she is bending forward unable to stand upright in the downpour, and this is all too much suffering for Avinash to take.

Now their own car breaks down, too, and they hitch a ride in the car of another newly married couple, Varun (Rajat Bedi) and Mahek (Kainaaz Parweez). Avinash has earlier hit the wife of Sukhvinder (Vishwajeet Pradhan), Mitali (Gargi Patel), while driving his boss Kashmira (Rakhi Sawant) in the dark, and he has dropped them all at a motel run by Adi (Vrajesh Hirjee), to which all these people go now, too, to also find Inspector Jatin (Shahwar Ali) and a prisoner he's carrying along (Kelly Dorje).

In case you are wondering how we remember the screen and real names of so many obscure cast members, we are thorough professionals who carry a notebook, a pencil, another spare pencil, a sharpener, an eraser, a digicam, a jack to raise the level of our seat to see names better, a walkie-talkie to communicate with our colleagues simultaneously watching the film in other theaters scattered all across the city, and a special microphone to directly record all our conversations in our own satellite.

Anyway, they all die and the film ends. The lead character here is Sonia, who says that she has become a prostitute so that she can make a lot of money and buy some farmland that her father lost. It's a good thing her father did not lose a pen or something. There are more holes in the plot than elements in it that make sense. The guys somehow roped in Juhi Chawla in a guest appearance to lend some dignity to the film. She'll need to start her career all over again.