By the time I reached Episode 5 of Amazon Prime’s 8-episode knock-the-socks-off season 2 of Breathe: Into The Shadows, I was no longer sure of who was or right. The serial tells you, it’s okay to kill if someone has destroyed your life and the law would do nothing.
Vigilantism is a tried-and-tested formula in our films. Here it is the panacea, the means to self-justice that Abhishek Bachchan’s Avinash has taken on as the weapon to remedial justice. You may not agree with his methods. But you will be persuaded to ask two questions: does anyone have the right to take anyone’s life no matter what the provocation, and do some scumbags deserve to live just because the law is equal for everyone?
I thought we were over and done with Dr Avinash Sabharwal, the loving husband, the doting father who is also a full-blown schizophrenic. Abhishek played the divided personality with such a wilful surrender of the ego that all we saw standing in front of us was a man trapped between being a good family man and protecting the same family by any means.
Breathe’s season 2 is even more violent than season 1. But none of it is unnecessary or irrelevant. Roughly every episode has Avinash’s doppelganger J finishing off one of his tormentors from the past. This season he has as his assistant-sidekick Victor Behl, played by the delightfully devilish Naveen Kasturia.
I was not sure of the role Kasturia’s Victor plays in Avinash’s bloody binge. Is Victor, with a troubled abusive past, the instigator reminding Avinash of those who have harmed Avinash and Victor, trying to merge the two hurts for added measure? And do all those people actually deserve to die?
For example, one of the victims is Avinash’s former colleague Indu Rao (Seema Biswas, sadly wasted) who had misdiagnosed a child’s ailment a mistake that killed the child. Does a colleague have the right to punish the medical malfunctioner?
Serial killers are the judge, jury and executioner, a law unto themselves. The new season explores the restless mind of a self-appointed executioner. It lays open the reasons and causes and allows us to judge the acts of crime. The minutely planned murder of a blind ventriloquist in a train is the most clenched stretch of the plot, bringing to the series an edgy suspense that we thought was gone with the glut on OTT.
Breathe: Into The Shadows resurrects our faith in the good old suspense drama about a killer on the prowl. Abhishek Bachchan’s smouldering silences convey a rage and pain seldom seen in our films. One moment he is a doting father cutting his birthday cake baked by his daughter, the next he is in a perfume factory in a prison in Kannauj executing a man who many years ago had troubled his wife.
The killing in the perfume factory is staged with a relentless sharpness a razorlike bluntness suggesting that any delay of killing the animal in human form could be destructive.
Abhishek captains this shrieking ship of laboured justice. I wish the other leads Amit Sadh, Nithya Menen and Saiyami Kher had better-written roles. What they have achieved from the shadows will leave you ….well, breathless.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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