Family dysfunction and trauma, mental illness, toxic behaviour patterns—these are some themes that prop up Masoom, a new mini series on Disney + Hotstar.
The family tree and the usual sense of infallibility and glorification that surround parent-child relationships in Hindi content are beginning to give way to more nuanced narratives in the recent past. Written and adapted from the original Irish series Blood by Satyam Tripathi and directed by Mihir Desai, Masoom, a psychological thriller in six episodes, captures the terrifying and isolating realisation that children can’t escape the emotional flaws, micro-aggressions and guilt traps of their parents.
Like the original, which has already had its second season, instead of creating exploitative shock and twists that a viewer takes for granted while watching a thriller, the makers of Masoom make the suffocating weight of family trauma the terror from which the twist derives its force. Can catharsis be liberating as well as soul-killing? Is the truth hidden within the sinews of damaged family dynamics?
Sana Kapoor (Samara Tijori) returns to her village in Punjab from Delhi when her mother, referred to as “Madamji” (Upasana Singh) by the village folk, dies. Her father, known as Doctor Saab (Boman Irani) runs the village’s only respectable private clinic. The couple is adored by the village and Doctor Saab, short on money, is poised for a political career.
Sana is distraught as she returns home. When she reaches the family home, meeting her father and her siblings, a brother (Veer Rajwant Singh) and a sister who is separated from her husband (Manjari Fadnnis), the tension can be cut with a knife.
The mother has just died: long suffering from a debilitating illness that restricted all movements of her limbs and confined her to a wheelchair, she apparently fell from her bed, hurt her forehead and died. Sana has other ideas, though. From the beginning, she is suspicious of her dad. It’s clear that father and daughter are estranged to some degree. Their reunion is even physically awkward. It is suggested that as a child, Sana witnessed something which has been bubbling under her subconscious ever since. The entire family, especially the father, is insistent on Sana taking her pills for a mental illness that is not quite spelled out. She is clearly the difficult child of the family—unpredictable, miserable and anguished. Her only solace is a childhood friend, who also inadvertently has a traumatic history with his own family.
The six episodes tease out how Dr Kapoor, respected pillar of community, man about town, involved in a comfortable affair with the long-serving nurse of his clinic, could have killed his wife. He doesn’t appear to be grief-stricken by his wife’s death, but does that mean he is the killer? Aren’t men conditioned to deal with loss by being even more impenetrable when they are dealing with loss?
Sana starts digging, and finds many clues that lead to the climactic moments. The potential for violence in Dr Kapoor is assuredly set up, but does this mean he killed his wife? The slow dread, including Sana’s past trauma, a secret that the family never addressed or resolved, is imbued into the family gatherings. So that’s the basic set-up for Masoom: a psychological family drama with a murder-mystery plot-line. Sana’s character is imploding, because running away from trauma, she has become consumed by it.
This is actor Boman Irani’s first protagonist role headlining a web series. He has been a constant fixture in Hindi films for over two decades now, his prolificacy often overshadowing some memorable roles. Here, he has the opportunity to get out of his comfort zone. Irani has some chilling moments on screen, but the performance doesn’t transcend the signature expressions and body language we are used to seeing him with.
Tijori, who showed immense promise in her debut role as a drug-addled college girl in Bob Biswas (2021, Zee 5), doesn’t overplay anything. She makes the impulses of Sana heavily internalised and scrunched down, her face mostly simmering with anguish and a sense of purpose to uncover painful truths—the performance all the more powerful because of that.
The series ends with a resolution, but the doctor still has an uneasy menacing presence in the final moments. It leaves the viewer with a sense that there is a post-truth. For one, there’s a suggestion in the middle of the series that Sana’s older sister, the textbook victim of patriarchy, a woman saddled by her worship of her father, has the signs of the disease that her mother suffered from.
Masoom has enough menace and phantoms in the realm of familial dynamics. Its punch on patriarchy, a back-handed one, is it biggest triumph.
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