Review: Boman Irani's 'Masoom' is a Gritty Tale About Complex Relationships

A poster of Masoom.

(Photo Courtesy: Pinterest)

Masoom starts off setting the tone - the Punjabi hinterland, with open fields, tall trees and the sinister silence. This is not the Punjab of making merry, jovial colours, good whiskey and parties, this is not the Punjab of dancing and music, of feasting and plenty but the Punjab in blue and green tones, telling a story of a big house in a small town and the people in it.

In Masoom, everyone is equal parts broken and equal parts damaged. Imagine Deepika and Naseer from Gehraiyaan and the dynamics from the English hit The Father.

The show has a Fargo-like feel - the open fields and beautiful landscape concealing something sinister bubbling underneath the surface, a cheetah hiding in the grasslands waiting to pounce. The visuals are reminiscent of the small towns of the midwest in North America. The themes also go with the backdrop - family secrets, big families in small towns and powerful families in small otherwise helpless towns and locally well- connected people and the secrets they hold and the crimes, quiet and undramatic, that occur sometimes in the middle of the day in sparsely populated places like Montana or Tennessee. Even the people are similar - the cowboys and country folk replaced by hearty farmland hardworking simple Punjabis.

A still from Masoom.

(Photo Courtesy: Disney+Hotstar)

The show follows the return of Sana Kapoor from Delhi to her small Punjabi village, beckoned there by the untimely death of her mother. Very close to her mother, she is disturbed and soon, the past which she had tried to forget and leave behind, starts to catch up to her. Dark, hidden secrets threaten to be unearthed and destroy their family once again.

Sana is tortured by the things that happened in her childhood and had left for those reasons, but now new traumas start to accumulate as more death, despair, betrayal, lies and secrets start to go down.

Was her mother murdered? Is her father, the terrifying and calculated doctor played by Boman Irani, not as he seems? From extra-marital affairs to homosexuality, from domestic violence to stealing, how much more was this family to deal with all these years later? In the show we follow Sana as she tries to uncover the rot that is mentally destroying her brother, sister, father and others and first and foremost, she sets out on a long winding complicated and dangerous journey to bring justice to her mother.

A still from Masoom.

(Photo Courtesy: Disney+Hotstar)

The set design, acting, music and direction are superb. The cast also performs what it is given very well and Boman Irani is, as usual, easy to watch. The script is slow paced and a slow burner and keeps in time with the pace and speed needed to make for a slow paced, slow burning watch. What’s more, that the pace of the script and story are very much in line with the pace of their physical surroundings and that harmony is atmospheric and creates the universe nicely but alas, the show does not have enough material to keep us at the edge of our seats throughout its run and the tension is not held throughout. There do remain, of course, nail biting moments and sequences but to hold onto that tempo seems all too difficult and the slow paced burn is sometimes just slow, with no burn.

This is no easy match, no lazy Sunday binge. It is dark and gritty and most certainly something that cannot be played as white noise but ultimately, if you sit through the difficult subject matter and heart tugging mentally gruesome psychological warfare, it is ultimately a rewarding journey.

Masoom is streaming on Disney+Hotstar.