The thing with the second season of Breathe: Into the Shadows is the way it underestimates the audience to be okay with its routine nature. The Abhishek Bachchan starrer series that has a central character with a split personality disorder is a dull package that tries to have the attire of a compelling thriller through a consistent loud background score.
After the events we witnessed in the previous season, Avinash Sabharwal is still in that rehabilitation center. While the entire world and media were debating about how he was escaping the trials and punishment due to his mental condition, the asylum doctors were optimistic about Avinash as there had been no sign of J for a long time. But things drastically changed when Avinash’s wife and daughter came to the asylum to celebrate his birthday. What all happened post that is what we see in Breathe: Into the Shadows Season 2.
The flatness of the writing is what drags this thriller from the very first episode. The initial moments of the series feel like one of those broad-stroke masala action films where logic takes a back seat. Even the pitch of the performances and the dialogues have that amplified masala drama which feels very odd. As the story progressed with each killing, the characters they had created didn’t get any depth. By the time the series reaches the eighth or ninth victim, the murders that we saw in the first or second episode feel like a vague memory of a past season. The twists and coincidences they have included in the screenplay to make it look compelling feel more like a convenient escape from writer’s block rather than an intelligent way of tackling it.
Abhishek Bachchan as Avinash Sabharwal is convincing as the character is going through a difficult patch in his life. Even though his transition to J is subtle, the performance as J is evidently theatric, and there were moments where the sequences that were supposed to be intimidating felt like imitating. In the initial episodes, the “hopeless cop” act of Amit Sadh as Kabir Sawant also looked very unreal. As the series progressed, Sadh managed to get the pitch of the character. Nithya Menen is the only actor who got a character that gets a better space and scope in this second season, and she performed the role of Abha very convincingly. Naveen Kasturia as Victor was truly memorable, and he was really in the zone of that creepy character who was not at all hesitant about making decisions. It was a performance that made me forget about his other performances while I was watching him.
This thriller’s major demerit is the writing that tries to create more episodes by creating characters with different categories of sins. At no point, we as an audience are excited to know the choices made by J, as almost every character is a fresh one. The funny part for me was the last episode’s last quarter, where Kabir Sawant failed to crack the last victim when he had all the clues right before him. And the series ignores many characters by the time it reaches those final episodes. The tail-end twist to the series somewhere felt like an Abbas Mustan-style twist which is a clear misfit for a series like this. The visual effects in certain areas looked very tacky.
Breathe: Into the Shadows Season 2 by Mayank Sharma is a bloated listless thriller that goes after creating newer characters in each episode to be unpredictable. I am still clueless about the purpose of the photograph puzzle in the series, and there is no improvement, even on a global OTT platform, on how these cyber activities are portrayed. The way they made everything a part of the plan makes the thriller look a lot stupider than real.
The way they made everything a part of the plan makes the thriller look a lot stupider than real.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
