Vidhu Vinod Chopra's Khamosh hits the sweet spot between reel and real, beauty and terror, even 37 years after release

Shot completely in Pahalgam, Kashmir Vidhu Vinod Chopra's 1986 whodunnit Khamosh lends tragic undertones to its beautiful setting.

Spoilers ahead

Vidhu Vinod Chopra's 1986 directorial Khamosh starts off with a couple embracing each other in the lap of Lidder River in Pahalgam, Kashmir. Seated on a rock that holds its spot against the loud, fierce gush of the river flow, the man and the woman promise never to leave each other's side. They're Amol (Amol Palekar) and Shabana (Shabana Azmi), two prolific actors filming a crucial sequence of their romantic thriller Aakhri Khoon.

Shabana Azmi plays a three-time National Award-winning actor in Khamosh

Cut to the last scene of Khamosh: Amol and Shabana are seated next to each other again. This time, they're not surrounded by the film crew or by scenic mountains and clear skies. They're locked in a dingy store house, with all their costumes hung up across, as they sit in a corner. Amol is about to murder Shabana, moments after she found out he's been murdering everyone on the film set all this while. Amol still talks to her in the same signature soft voice, but Shabana doesn't reciprocate. She's terrified and for good reason.

Between reel and real

Vidhu establishes early on the parallel between the reel and the real when Amol, Shabana, and Soni Razdan (the first one to get murdered), reveal themselves as their real selves. In fact, Shabana is a three-time National Award winner, even in the film. Soni's dead body is found exactly in the same spot that's mentioned in the screenplay of Aakhri Khoon, hanging on a tree branch, in full sight of Shabana as she embraces Amol on the rock in the river.

When Naseeruddin Shah's Capt. Rajeev Bakshi arrives at the murder scene, a crew member tips him off against the producer, who infamously offered the casting couch to Soni in a party and later even zoomed in on her dead body for the shot needed in the film. For a producer, lines are blurred between the reel and the real: he exploits female actors for his personal leisure and milks a real tragedy for artistic purpose.

Naseeruddin's character wastes no time for the real investigator to arrive. As Soni's brother, he considers it his narrative duty to take charge of the investigation himself. Shabana doesn't want to indulge in more suspension of disbelief, so she chucks The Godfather book for a magazine cover story on herself. As she takes a shower while Psycho's infamous shower murder scene plays on her TV, she's spared a similar fate because she chose vanity over storytelling, reality over movies.

Soni Razdan rehearses her lines of the abla nari (damsel in distress) scene right before she falls victim to the murderer. Everyone in the film crew assumes she's only rehearsing lines. It's only Shabana, forbidden to be another abla nari in real life, who realises Soni's last words, “Help! Please don't kill me” can't be a part of the script because they're in English.

Cinematographer Binod Pradhan uses harsh studio lights that are turned away from the film shoot and towards the investigation scene whenever a new breakthrough is found. A special red light is used at the end to expose the murderer.

Amol Palekar is cast against type as the face of India's middle-of-the-road movement in the 1970s and ‘80s is roped in as a power-hungry, relentless executioner. He never shares the same chemistry with Shabana than her parallel cinema co-star Naseeruddin, who eventually saves his heroine from Amol. When Shabana feigns sleepwalking while following Amol, the terror in her eyes betray her three-time National Award-worth acting skills. Amol stops her and tells her, “Acting mat karo Shabana, mere saamne toh nahi,” underlining how a co-star can tell when another isn’t hitting the right chords.

Between beauty and terror

In Khamosh, Vidhu Vinod Chopra takes Alfred Hitchcock to Kashmir. He marries his penchant for world cinema from FTII to his humble origins from the northern state. Before he made films like Mission Kashmir (2000) and Shikara (2020), which struck the balance between beauty and terror, he did so most stealthily in Khamosh.

Binod Pradhan's lens on Pahalgam is aesthetically striking, but never with the rose-tinted glasses of say, a Yash Chopra. There's no chiffon in the snow, but slow-motion shots of a falling water glass, a piercing shower, and a dead body resting against a rock in the river. Sounds of gunshots echoing in the valley and streams of water finding a release are minutely captured by Mangesh Desai. Editor Renu Saluja knows when to make the frame breathe and when to whip it to a breaking point. And music composer Vanraj Bhatia is in full Bernard Herrmann mood, enveloping Kashmir with a noir, almost-Gothic vibe.

Vidhu uses the narrow corridors, creaky floors, and dim-lit rooms of the Pahalgam hotel to build an environment of potential tragedy. Only someone born and raised in Kashmir can invoke this degree of terror in the land known for its exquisite beauty. And that too, years before the Kashmiri Pandit Exodus, after which Kashmir became synonymous with the complex blend of poetry and pain. Kudos to the director who could see this contrasting duality in everything he loved: his home state of Kashmir as well as his job of making movies.

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