Rahasya Review {1.5/5} & Review Rating
One of the releases this week is Manish Gupta's RAHASYA. RAHASYA means 'secret' in Hindi. Does this film live up to its title or falls flat? Let's analyze.
The film starts off with the murder of Ayesha Mahajan ('Baby' Saakshi Sem), the only daughter of her parents Aarti Mahajan (Tisca Chopra) and Sachin Mahajan (Ashish Vidyarthi). As soon as the police start investigating the case, the needle of suspicion moves from one person to the other. After having interrogated the suspects, the police then arrests Sachin Mahajan on the basis that he is the 'prime suspect'. When he is cooling his heels in the jail, there enters the CBI Inspector Sunil Paraskar (Kay Kay Menon), who, after discovering that Sachin is innocent and is being falsely implicated, goes on a mission to nab the actual culprit. During this journey, he discovers (read 'uncovers') many ugly truths. Added to this are the twists and turns in the story, which also includes a string of murders. Everytime there is a person in the form of a 'clue' leading to the actual murderer; that person gets bumped off in very mysterious circumstances.
Will Sunil Paraskar be able to solve the complicated case, who is the real master mind behind all the killings, what was the real motive to kill the innocent Ayesha who meant no harm to anyone and what are the ugly truths that Sunil Paraskar uncovers during the process of his investigation is what forms the rest of the film.
Bollywood has witnessed many a reel-life-imitating-real-life films like ANKUR ARORA MURDER CASE, NO ONE KILLED JESSICA etc. With RAHASYA, director Manish Gupta has tried his level best to keep the secret (read 'whodunit') intact. One must admit that, he achieves it to a large extent, thanks to the plot. The whodunit aspect of the film notwithstanding, Manish suffers in his direction very badly. Even some wonderful performances could have been extracted from the talented cast, Manish fails miserably to accomplish that. Over a period of time, the film starts boring you because of it being stretched at unwanted places. One wonders what must have been going through Manish's head when he felt that the 'realistic' annoying sound of the munching dry fruits should be added in the film! The sound really irritates over a period of time.
As far as the performances are concerned, it's Tisca Chopra who carries the film on her shoulders, even though there are places wherein even she starts over performing in few scenes. The same can be said about Ashish Vidyarthi, who also puts up a good show. Kay Kay Menon, who had a remarkable role in BABY (which released last week), is very disappointing in the role of a CBI Inspector in RAHASYA. He tries too hard to mould himself into the tough cop's role, but fails in the bargain. The rest of the cast in the form of Meeta Vashisht, Ashwini Kalsekar (really good in certain places), Manoj Maurya and Vinit Kakar do their bit to carry the film forward.
Both, the music of the film (Ranjit Barot) and the background music fail to leave a lasting impact. The film's editing (Suresh Pai) is just about average. Had he edited a few minutes of the film, it wouldn't have lagged as badly. The film's cinematography (Faroukh Mistry) is strictly average.
On the whole, RAHASYA can be skipped without any regret.
