CHEHRE Thriller is a half-baked effort with too many plot holes
AN AD agency chief caught up in a heavy snowstorm is forced to abandon his car and seek shelter in an eerie hilltop mansion.
He encounters four elderly retired law professionals, who meet up regularly to conduct a mock trial, with a judge, defence counsel, prosecutor, and a hangman. They decide to put the stranded traveller on trial for murder, much to his bemusement, but things start spiralling out of control when his past wrongdoing slowly starts to emerge, and he realises all is not what it seems.
Chehre is an adaptation of Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1956 novel A Dangerous Game, which has previously been brought to life in various countries around the world, including Indian Kannada language film Male Nilluvavarege (2015).
Despite having a strong cast, an atmospheric setting and a great source material with the acclaimed novel, writer-director Rumi Jafry messes things up with this surprisingly awful effort loaded with half-baked characters. A poorly written screenplay stretches out a great central idea and injects it with too many scenes that remove any kind of tension from proceedings. The predictable story is loaded with too many plot holes and moments that don’t really make much sense. There is also questionable messaging in there and the female characters are reduced to caricatures.
Amitabh Bachchan has a magnetic presence but is given way too much screen time and preachy monologues. Emraan Hashmi returns to playing grey-shaded characters that helped build his career, but he isn’t really given a chance to shine in Chehre. The other cast members pretty much spend the whole film overacting. Had Jafry followed the original source material and not tried cramming too much in, there was potential for a gripping tension-filled drama.