Shaque Trust No One review: Parineeti Chopra's thriller gets lost in too many twists

Shaque: Trust No One review: The film follows a mother searching for the daughter taken from her at birth. The series piles on twists and secrets, blunting both its suspense and emotional force.

In Short

• The series adapts a Delimar Vera-like reunion story with emotional potential
• Its seven episodes overextend a premise better suited to film
• Mystery fades early as viewers can predict the broad reveal quickly

There is a beautiful story buried inside Shaque: Trust No One. In fact, it is the kind of story we have heard before and still find difficult to forget. It is inspired by the real-life story of Delimar Vera, the little girl who disappeared as a baby and was reunited with her mother years later. It is emotional, unbelievable and almost cinematic without needing much embellishment.

Shaque takes a similarly straightforward emotional premise and stretches it into seven episodes of roughly 40 minutes each. And that is where the trouble begins. This was a story that had the bones of a tight two-hour film. Instead, the makers try to turn it into a thriller, an emotional family drama, a mystery about secrets and relationships, and, at times, almost a supernatural story. There is kidnapping, illegal surrogacy, infidelity, saas-bahu drama, witchcraft, hallucinations and enough secrets floating around to fill several shows.

Sometimes, a story doesn’t need everything. At its core, Shaque is about a mother trying to find her daughter, who was kidnapped at birth. She holds on to the belief that the child is still alive and will be back in her life. That alone is a strong enough premise. But the show keeps adding layers, as if the makers are worried that the central story will not hold your attention on its own. The result is a thriller that keeps producing twists but forgets to build the one thing a good thriller absolutely needs: genuine curiosity.

By the second or third episode, you have already figured out where the story is headed. From there, you are not really wondering what happened. You are waiting to understand why it happened and how it happened. And when the audience has already cracked the broad mystery while the characters continue walking around it for several more episodes, the suspense starts becoming an exercise in patience.

The title, Shaque, or doubt, is perhaps the biggest missed opportunity. The show wants the audience to doubt everyone. But the protagonist herself is rarely given a reason to genuinely suspect anyone. And that is not entirely her fault; it is a result of poor writing.

And then there are the secrets. Everyone seems to have one. On paper, these are juicy, pulpy ingredients for a gripping tale. But Shaque wants to simultaneously be a big emotional story about a mother and a twisty thriller about everyone around her. Somewhere between the two, the makers lose the plot.

The writing also leans heavily on convenience. You have a police officer, but you want to give him an emotional angle, and then also have him read tarot cards, turning him into another way of giving the protagonist hope and pushing the story towards the next revelation. It feels less like something organically emerging from the character and more like the writers needed another block to complete the picture.

The same applies to some of the more heightened sequences, including the heavy red lighting and hallucination portions. They announce “thriller” rather than organically creating one. It is also so overdramatic that it becomes unintentionally funny.

Unfortunately, even the emotional core doesn’t land as strongly as it should. You don’t feel the mother’s heartbreak in the way the story demands. You don’t feel devastated by her loss. Even when she sees other people’s children and desperately tries to find her daughter in them, the scenes that should break your heart instead feel staged and, at times, frustrating.

Parineeti Chopra has her moments. In the vulnerable portions, she manages to bring out glimpses of the grief underneath her character’s anger. But most of the time, she plays the character with such an intense, almost permanently angry expression that the distinction between anguish and vengeance gets blurred.

Tahir Raj Bhasin, in a grey role, manages to make his character suitably creepy. Soni Razdan is the surprise package, largely because the contrast between her innocent face and what her character does creates some genuinely unsettling moments. Harleen Sethi, Sumeet Vyas and Anup Soni get strong parts and do what the material demands. Jennifer Winget, meanwhile, gets perhaps the most interesting opportunity to display her range. After Beyhadh, she once again gets to explore different shades of a character and proves why she can hold your attention even when the writing around her is uneven.

Shimla, too, looks beautiful. But it remains just that: beautiful. The locations never really become a character in the story. In a thriller set against a place with such a distinct atmosphere, the mountains, fog and isolation could have added enormously to the mood. Instead, they mostly remain a scenic backdrop.

Siddharth P Malhotra and Rensil D’Silva have both been associated with strong work in the past, but here the desire to make the story a “thriller” seems to overpower the story itself. The makers want to give you a wholesome drama when the material never demanded one. They want mystery, emotion, romance, family secrets, supernatural undertones and a miracle, all at once. And in trying to make Shaque everything, they make it surprisingly little.

Seven episodes later, the biggest mystery is not who took the daughter. It is why this story needed seven episodes in the first place.

- Ends