New Delhi

Film criticism is a strange job these days. If one takes a cursory glance at Rotten Tomatoes pages of some of the recent crowd-pleasing movies, Bollywood or otherwise, there is a huge gulf between the critics' ratings and the audiences' ratings. On social media sites, particularly Twitter, if critics end up giving a negative review to a well-loved movie, trolls heap abuse -- it's a given at this point. There is a certain lack of trust here. And R Balki uses that in his latest, 'Chup: Revenge of the Artist'. Balki is worth admiring for always trying to do something different with each film. The resulting experiments are not always successful, but he deserves the points when most of his peers use readymade formulas to make big bucks.

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The concept of 'Chup' alone is worth the price of admission, even if the execution turns out to be clumsy. The film gets enough things right for it to be an oft-interesting-and-never-boring film. It will also probably kick off a debate about critiquing works of art (if we consider films works of art, that is) -- something, I presume, the writers (Balki, Raja Sen, and Rishi Virmani) intended. 

A serial killer is loose on the rain-drenched streets of Bandra, Mumbai, and this one is pretty finicky. He (or she?) only murders film critics. And his modus operandi is brutal, almost vengeful. The corpses are found, in different cases, slashed as though by a coked-up wolverine, cut in half a railway track, and in one case, the major internal organs are removed. The killings appear to echo the metaphors used in the reviews. 

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 (it's like R Balki is daring us critics to give 'Chup' bad reviews)

The culprit does have one thing going for them. They are fair. They target those critics too who they believe are over-generous with their star ratings. A movie called 'Kalinga', an expensive spectacle and little else (a reference to 'Kalank', no doubt) is effusively praised by the fearful critics, one of whom is killed anyway.

So who is this picky killer? Is it a disgruntled filmmaker? Or one of their fanatics? Or just a psychopath who believes film critics should not exist. This is the question Inspector General Arvind Mathur (a refreshingly understated Sunny Deol) is tasked to answer. 

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Also Read: 'Chup' movie review: Dulquer Salmaan, Sunny Deol's film may silence most of its critics

One other subplot follows a gentle but lonely florist Danny who has a habit of talking to himself. He falls in love with entertainment reporter Nila Menon (a brilliant Shreya Dhanwanthary, who also played a journalist called Sucheta Dalal in 'Scam 1992'), after spotting that she, too, talks to herself (yes!). 

Eventually, these two threads coalesce, as they must.

'Chup' is not really a murder mystery, which the trailers had led me to think. The film does not even try to hide the person who has acquired the status of bogeyman for the film critics. Or at least I think that is the case. That would have been fine by me. But the movie tries to cram too many ideas into its plot, which is way more than it can handle. It is, simultaneously, many things -- a tribute to Guru Dutt, a police procedural, a thriller, a meditation on the art of film criticism, and even a bit of a character study. In the end, it fails at being any of those. For instance, Arvind, despite Sunny really nailing the role that requires him to be more subtle than he likely wanted, comes across as something of a dunce for a high-ranking police officer (I am sure that wasn't the attention). 

Watch | Critically Speaking: Has Dulquer Salmaan delivered his career best in 'Chup'?

There are moments when 'Chup' throws up a few interesting questions and then leaves one hanging. Also, for an out-and-out psychopathic serial killer, the script goes too long a way into explaining why they became what they became -- the rough childhood, the abusive parent, the dead dog, and so. Oh, the poor thing. One character even says something like, "It's no surprise then they turned into a serial killer." It's not just off-putting, but also rather quotidian.

There are, of course, a lot of things to like here, which is why I said earlier that the movie is never boring even when it stumbles. The performances are excellent all around. Deol, Salmaan, and Dhanwanthary are all pretty great. Cinematographer Vishal Sinha, going along with the movie's throughline, makes Mumbai even more beautifully cinematic than it is during Monsoons. The visuals are quite lovely, and well-complemented by Aman Pant's score. The classic Hindi songs appear in the movie every now and then, and this reminded me of 'Bombay Rose', a stunning hand-animated feature that is, in my opinion, the finest tribute to Bollywood. 

And finally, 'Chup' does succeed in bringing out the fraught relationship between filmmakers and critics. So, that's it. This film is largely watchable but is not as profound as it thinks it is.