Will you never forgive your father, a forlorn Gunwant asks her daughter Sana, who seems to have no response or regard for her mother’s probing questions. Streaming on Disney + Hotstar, Mihir Desai and Gurmmeet Singh’s Masoom is a six-part mystery drama that marks the debut of veteran actor Boman Irani on OTT platforms. But that’s about it—because beyond Irani’s breath-taking performance, there is nothing that stands out about Masoom.
Based on a 2018 Irish soap, Blood, this series falls flat in creating a stable or engaging storyline, and fails to do justice to the potential its cast holds.
Superb cast, weak plot
Sana Kapoor (Samara Tijori) returns from Delhi following her mother Gunwant’s death (Upasana Singh). She has neurological problems and seems to have a strained relationship with her father, Balraj Kapoor (Boman Irani). There are constant flashbacks of her recalling her father beating someone up, and throughout the series, she is deeply apprehensive of him. These flashbacks are claimed to be Sana’s lie by her family, which severs her equation with all of them.
But what really seems like a family drama takes a quick turn to become a murder mystery, with Sana going all out to prove that her mother’s death was a well-planned homicide. Debutante Samara Tijori fails to leave an impact as Sana. Despite her dark past and cynical, fidgety antics, she can’t convince the audience about her love for her mother, or the grief that her death must have brought upon her. Romi (Sarika Singh) as Boman Irani’s approved-by-all extramarital affair makes a wonderful addition to this mysterious plot.
The other main characters in the show are Sana’s siblings, Sanjana (Manjari Fadnnis) and Sanjeev (Veer Rajwant Singh). Even Akashdeep Arora features in this web series as Monty, a friend of Sana’s. It is refreshing to see both Arora and Singh break out of their caricaturish FilterCopy moulds to adopt a more brooding and serious look—one they really do justice to. However, the screenplay is dull and lacks lustre, and undermines the capability of this wonderful cast by creating a plot that is slow-paced and awkwardly repetitive.
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Masoom lacks depth
The biggest problem with Masoom is that it lacks depth. The death of Gunwant does not seem to leave an impact because of how superficially the characters mourn her death. They seem to lack that interpersonal connection or bonding that can invoke the feeling of them being a family beyond the labels assigned to them.
Even Sanjeev’s gay identity is not developed as much as it should and seems like a half-hearted attempt to represent the LGBTQIA community on OTT platforms. There are multiple plot points that do not get resolved by the end of the series and just vanish somewhere between the fifth and sixth episodes.
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The show has some redeeming qualities
Though to its credit, Masoom does keep up the sinister masquerade of Boman Irani being the antagonist till the very end. But the conclusion is so banal that even the scarcely built intrigue receives a grudging end. Boman Irani does a fabulous job of consistently maintaining the shady façade of his character as you keep suspecting him. But other characters somehow always seem to be reserved and nervous—something that should work out for the tone of the series—except it does not.
Gunwant, however, stands out as a character with her striking Punjabi poetry. It is lovely to see Upasana Singh break out of comedy to play a sensitive and impactful role. Moreover, the show does have its set of heart-warming moments between the siblings, as well as Sana and Balraj. ‘Mithiye’—a mother’s love, is a beautiful musical exchange between Sanjeev and Gunwant, and is the highlight of the show.
The major fault here is not with anyone’s acting skills, but the story itself, because it fails to bring forth the intensity and chemistry between characters—not expected from Gurmmeet Singh, the man behind the ever-so-thrilling Mirzapur.
Masoom tries too hard to be a murder mystery as well as a slow-burn psychological thriller but fails in both areas. It would have been better as a family-focused drama that talks about grief and coping with loss, rather than trying to become yet another Disney+ Hotstar web series that places itself in the crime genre. Looks like we have to wait for another OTT project that can allow Boman Irani to display his maximum potential.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)