Is Breathe: Into the Shadows, Abhishek Bachchan’s web debut, worth a watch?

Two decades — that’s how long it’s been since Abhishek Bachchan made his acting debut, in JP Dutta’s Refugee. He sauntered into the limelight as the silent, smouldering type, a smuggler of people and things, 20 years ago. Now, his digital debut sees him in a similar light; only, this time, he’s dealing in mind games on and off the clock.

Last month, the makers of the film Gulabo Sitabo, starring his father Amitabh Bachchan, opted to take the online route, prompting cinema-owners to cry foul. Now, Bachchan Junior has jumped on the OTT bandwagon with director Mayank Sharma’s Breathe: Into the Shadows, on Amazon Prime.

As a well-off psychiatrist called Avinash Sabharwal, Bachchan Jr meets his digital audiences as the man Delhi’s cops bank on to challenge those trying to evade the wheels of justice by feigning mental illness. But, under all the well-tailored suits, he’s still the taciturn man from Refugee walking the tightrope between two worlds.

Not waiting to exhale

This is the second installment of the Breathe series. The first featured R Madhavan in the role of a football coach, a father who goes on a killing spree to bump his terminally ill son’s name up on the list of those waiting to receive organ transplants.

Bachchan, as Sabharwal, has to face similar odds when his insulin-dependent daughter Siya (Ivana Kaur) gets abducted. Nithya Menen plays  Abha, Sabharwal’s wife and a professional chef. The couple is traumatised by the kidnapping, waiting almost endlessly for a ransom note that never comes. Assigned to their case is a hot-headed cop called Kabir Sawant, played by Amit Sadh, who resumes his role from the first season.

When the clay-mask-sporting kidnapper does make contact months later, the demand made for the release of the child is one the parents hadn’t anticipated: they are expected to kill a germaphobe shopkeeper, a stranger they’ve never crossed paths with. He’s just the first of many. The kidnapper doesn’t want a straight killing; he wants the Sabharwals to indulge in psychological warfare with the intended victims before the actual murder.

Bachchan describes the show as an edge-of-the-seat thriller, with surprises thrown in every five to 10 minutes. He is right, if partially so. But is a thriller really a thriller if the audience has enough time to wonder if watching the series is really worth its time? If the first season of Breathe felt like a bit of a letdown, the second season cements that sentiment. Overbaked mind games strung together with shallow storytelling resting solely on plot twists don’t make a series binge-worthy.

Storytellers worth their salt know it is sometimes necessary to kill your darlings; the second season of Breathe is what happens when you don’t. Every twist the makers thought of seems to have found its way into the story. If Breathe were a dish, it’d be the English Trifle Rachel from FRIENDS put together, a questionable and erroneous combination of ladyfingers, jam, custard, beef, peas, bananas and whipped cream.

When stars rob the audience

To be fair, the lead cast does a fair job of trying to keep the series afloat. Indeed, we could certainly have had more of the supporting cast. In particular, Hrishikesh Joshi, Shrikant Verma, Saiyami Kher and Shradha Kaul show off their acting prowess well. If this were a film, these actors may not have been given the screen space they got in the series. Their work for Breathe: Into the Shadows is a reminder of how keeping the spotlight on ‘stars’ alone has been a loss for audiences.

A stunning example of this is in Hardik Mehta’s Har Kisse Ke Hisse: Kaamyaab (streaming on Netflix), a film that may not have got its due in theatres but has certainly found an audience online, as it should. In a story that deserves to be told, Sanjay Mishra shines bright as an aging actor in an industry supported by side actors and have-beens, people who have done remarkable jobs of the stock, almost comical, roles allotted to them in Bollywood.

As Sudheer, Mishra represents a man on the inside, but who is actually on the outside, just one of the many names that appear on the lower rung of credits at the end of a film. Such character actors, in Sudheer’s words, were called aloo (potato), simply because they could fit into any dish.

A chance to right a wrong

If 2020 has given us anything, it is the opportunity to dive into home-crafted stories basking in the warmth of actors who’ve not received their share of accolades. It is a chance to right this wrong, all the while being entertained.

Jaideep Ahlawat, seen as Inspector Hathiram Chaudhary on Amazon Prime’s somewhat gruesome but riveting show Paatal Lok, is just one example of actors who have been grossly underrated.

Another example is in a dark comedy called Afsos (also on Amazon Prime), where Gulshan Devaiah holds the story together as Nakul, a failed writer with a record number of unsuccessful suicide attempts. The story is so outrageous that it warrants a watch. The show also features Heeba Shah, who excels in the role of a contract killer.

Comedian Sumukhi Suresh as Pushpavalli, in the series by the same name on Amazon Prime, makes one equally uncomfortable with her convoluted ways to get what she wants. These are stories that have found an audience solely due to streaming platforms, and one can never be too thankful for that. 

A platform for the veterans, too

These platforms have also worked well for senior actors: Netflix’s first outing with an Indian show, the Saif Ali Khan-starrer and Emmy-nominated Sacred Games, is one instance of this.

More recently, Aarya, featuring Sushmita Sen, on Disney+ Hotstar, reminded us that Sen could still hold the spotlight as a multifaceted character in a series that centres around a legacy of crime (it also gave us a Shashi Tharoor-like Chandrachur Singh).

Joining Sen online is Lara Dutta, with Hundred, a show streaming on Disney+ Hotstar. Dutta and her co-star Rinku Rajguru (of Sairat fame) play women who are fearless and flawed. The story treatment might be simplistic in this one, but it is another step forward in an industry that is still shrugging off lethargic plots and characters we’ve all seen a thousand times before.

Someday we'll return to the world of darkened cinema halls and overpriced popcorn. But that day is unlikely to be in the immediate future. Till  then, the ever-growing world of streaming platforms continues to offer a much-needed break from real-time news, and perhaps a continued chance to discover stories and actors who have been on the sidelines for far too long.

The big names will be around, of course. Come October, Abhishek Bachchan will be back in a new avatar with The Big Bull, a biographical crime drama backed by Ajay Devgn and Anand Pandit, which will be released on Disney+ Hotstar.

Until then, one will be left wondering if the antagonist in Breathe knows the best places for discounted electronics or if he is insanely loaded: all his messages to the Sabharwal family get delivered on shiny new iPads. If the series reveals the masked man’s electronics dealer, perhaps Breathe: Into the Shadows will be worth the time it devours.