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Parineet Chopra’s Anvita in Shaque feels like a variation on the troubled, gaslit woman she played in The Girl On The Train, leaving the performance stuck in familiar territory.
Shaque Trust No One starring Parineeti Chopra and Jennifer Winget is now streaming on Netflix.
Shaque: Trust No OneU/A
2/5
Starring: Parineeti Chopra, Jennifer Winget, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Anup Soni, Soni Razdan, Harleen Sethi and Sumeet VyasDirector: Rensil D’SilvaPlatform: Netflix
Shaque Web Series Review: Siddharth P Malhotra and Rensil D’Silva’s Shaque: Trust No One is like a house of cards. It begins with enough mystery to pull you in, only to gradually unravel as the writing keeps making one misstep after another. By the end, you’re left staring into a blank space, wondering what happened to all those loose ends.
The problem isn’t that it’s born out of a single-line plot. The problem is that this one-liner is over-stretched to create a hollow, bloated series, which makes you wonder if you’ve run dry out of emotions. Living up to its genre and title, Shaque is filled with a lot of twists and turns. It does keep you guessing, mostly about when the suspense will finally kick in.
Set in Shimla, the series opens with Anvita giving birth to a baby girl and naming her Apeksha. The family rejoices but amid the celebrations are a few silent, uncomfortable glances. We’re almost instantly told to switch on our ‘shaque’ button. Later that night, a nurse enters the room and takes Apeksha away.
Exhausted, delirious and under the influence of medication, Anvita barely registers what has happened. Predictably, the hospital CCTV malfunctions and the police are unable to trace the kidnapper. But in Shaque, everyone is a suspect – Anvita’s husband Alok, her mother-in-law Madhu, her best friend Shreya and Shreya’s husband Bhaskar.
We soon learn that Madhu had enlisted a ‘dhongi baba’ to perform black magic to ensure Apeksha disappears. They claim that the child is a ‘maanglik’, who could ruin Alok’s life. But neither Madhu nor the baba is necessarily the kidnapper. Suspicion soon shifts to Alok and Shreya, who are secretly having an affair. Eight years pass. She now has another daughter, Siddhi.
Anvita begins experiencing episodes that blur the line between reality and imagination. She’s on medication to keep her hallucinations at bay but her condition has placed considerable strain on her marriage. She continues to celebrate Apeksha’s birthday every year, clinging to the hope that her daughter will one day return.
Intriguingly, on every birthday, the kidnapper sends Anvita faceless photographs of Apeksha. During one of her episodes, Anvita mistakes Sakshi’s (a new entrant in their town) daughter, Rhea, for Apeksha. She goes to extraordinary lengths to prove it. Thrown into this increasingly tangled web is Khurana, a cop who seems to be the only person willing to believe Anvita.
He takes her suspicions seriously and declares, ‘A mother’s suspicion and a cop’s suspicion are the same.’ And so, even after nine years, he refuses to give up on the case and continues his investigation. Meanwhile, Anvita keeps being blamed and gaslit by her husband for not keeping an eye on their newborn. Siddhi too blames her mother for her episodes that has driven her friends away.
Now, the issue is, there are too many subplots interwoven into it – a surrogacy racket involving tribal women, a lot of mumbo-jumbo and black magic and a character suffering from cancer. But none of them are able to complicate the narrative and inject a sense of intrigue. These look less like red herrings and more like desperate attempts to manufacture suspicion and increase the run-time.
One among Shaque’s many weak links is its lack of nuance. Mental health, for instance, is used more as a mystery mechanism than explored as a lived experience. Anvita’s hallucinations are crucial to making us question whether she is right about Rhea but the series doesn’t seem to spend enough time examining the emotional or psychological consequences of losing a child.
And without that complexity, suspicion becomes a storytelling trick. For a story centred on a grieving mother, Shaque strangely has very little interest in grief itself. There are multiple mentions on how cracks have begun appearing in Anvita and Alok’s marriage. But we rarely get a glimpse of the same. The series also sidesteps a deeper exploration of how society shames Anvita for her condition.
Shaque has all the familiar trappings of a cosy crime drama – a hill town, cool-toned frames, lurking shadows and a seemingly irresistible mystery at its centre. But strip away the atmosphere and much of it feels like mere ornamentation. The makers seem to mistake mood and visual texture for the depth the story struggles to provide.
What passes for misdirection in Shaque is really just delayed disclosure. Information is strategically held back until the screenplay is ready to hand it to the character, who happens to be in focus. For instance, Khurana waits till the very end to arrest the baba when he knew all this while that he’s the one religiously invested in human sacrifice.
At its core, this series often feels like a melodramatic soap opera, with the mother’s suffering and sacrifice threatening to become the story’s be-all and end-all. Well, she clearly tries her best to convey a mother’s all-consuming grief, seeing her missing daughter in every little girl she encounters but the performance lacks visceral intensity.
Anvita feels like a variation on the troubled, gaslit woman she played in The Girl On The Train, leaving the performance stuck in familiar territory. Even the pivotal moment when she learns that her baby has been kidnapped – a scene that should shatter the film emotionally – barely registers. She strains for the breakdown but the anguish never travels beyond the surface.
Her exhaustion remains frustratingly surface-level. There’s little volatility, rage or spark to the performance. Instead, she moves through the series with an emotional flatness that makes Anvita’s nine-year ordeal feel far less affecting than it should. It’s Jennifer Winget as Sakshi, however, who steals the thunder despite not being a part of every frame of the narrative.
There are shades of Beyhadh in her obsessive, possessive streak. The screenplay keeps pushing her towards increasingly melodramatic turns, often reducing her psychological complexity to a convenient plot device. Still, she manages to inject some much-needed spark. Her luminous screen presence is unmissable.
Tahir Raj Bhasin gets perhaps the least interesting material to work with as Alok. The performance often feels stiff when the role demands emotional ambiguity. Alok’s secrets, infidelity and complicated relationship with Anvita could have made him a fascinatingly conflicted character, but the screenplay keeps him hovering between concerned husband and obvious suspect.
Harleen Sethi is effective as Shreya, particularly once her secrets begin to surface. She brings a natural ease to the role and manages to make Shreya’s shifting loyalties reasonably intriguing. Though constrained by a middling screenplay, she makes the most of what she’s given. Sumeet Vyas, on the other hand, remains criminally underutilised and his sudden removal from the narrative feels jarring.
Anup Soni as Khurana is perhaps the biggest missed opportunity. He again suffers due to a poor character sketch. There’s no explanation why he takes Anvita so seriously when everyone else questions her. Is it professional instinct, empathy, intuition or something else? We don’t know. His inconsistent Punjabi accent doesn’t help either.
Soni Razdan’s Madhu, on paper, is an interesting character as her seemingly maternal exterior masks darker intentions. She doesn’t overplay the menace, allowing the character’s actions to do much of the heavy lifting. But the screenplay doesn’t give her enough room to explore the contradictions within Madhu.
Shaque could’ve been an intimate, psychologically unsettling story about a grieving mother. What the story really needed was more character, more grief and more depth rather than just jaded cliches including a nod to Rosemary’s Baby. By the time the answers arrive, there is very little left to feel. And Parineeti’s curiously subdued performance gives the title one more reason to live up to itself.
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Ask News18Set in Shimla, the series follows Anvita, played by Parineeti Chopra, whose newborn daughter Apeksha is mysteriously kidnapped from a hospital. Nine years later, Anvita continues her relentless search for her missing child while navigating a tangled web of suspicious family members, police investigations, and her own hallucinations.
Ask News18About the Author
Titas Chowdhury is a Special Correspondent at News18 Showsha. She writes about cinema, music and gender in cinema. Interviewing actors and filmmakers, writing about latest trends in showbiz and bringi…Read More
September 24, 2026, 17:49 IST
