Ved Khanna (Sharib Hashmi) is an eminent lawyer in Panchgani. His daughter, Tia (Ebadat Hussain) is in a boarding school in Panchgani, which is also eminently weird, because his wife, Meera, and he reside in this hill station in Maharashtra that is also haven to so many boarding schools!
On his birthday, Ved returns from an out-of-town assignment to find that his wife has gone missing after setting up a celebration at home for him. He visits his daughter (as planned with his wife), to whom he is very attached, late at night, and she has even brought him a cake. He tells Tia that her mom is unwell and she pleads with him about when she will be taken out of the hostel to live with them, as he has been promising her.
The next morning, he files a missing person’s report at the police station. The inspector, Amar Sathe (Aamir Dalvi), who also writes stories as a hobby, has his own brand of wry humor and decides to help Ved, though technically, an official report can only be filed if a person is missing at least for 24 hours.
And the missing wife (Anupriya Goenka) surfaces the next day. Shockingly, Ved finds that she is not his wife, though Meera shows that she knows the smallest details about her ‘husband’ and is actually his wife! And then Meera’s sister Aditi (Kriti Garg), Tia’s school principal (Hutoxi Patel) and finally even Tia recognize her as Meera.
Ved is flummoxed, even more so when Meera reveals the most intricate facts about him and their life together and displays a scar on her back that no one could have known about. Helpfully, Amar sends Ved to Mumbai to identify a body whose description matches Meera’s details as he is insisting that the woman is an impostor. And the last straw is when a psychiatrist visits Ved with Meera, and Aditi and Meera both vouch for the fact that Ved is mentally ill and has been under medication for two years but is neglecting his medicines of late.
In desperation, Ved enlists the help of a self-styled private detective, Devraj (Ravi Kant Sinha), who informs him that he has evidence that the so-called Meera is someone else’s wife.
Anyone who has watched the solid 1989 thriller, Khoj, which in turn was lifted from a British film, will know where this movie, titled the same with a suffix, is heading, but for some changes in detailing. But while the core and its denouement make sense, the detailing undoes a lot of the impact.
An unforgivable flaw here is the use of a child (Tia) in a way that is nothing less than objectionable, and anything more said here would be a spoiler. The second is the needless depiction of Meera’s boss in a social organization: there was no necessity of showing him talking to Amar when the question later arises in our mind: “Why wasn’t he asked to come and identify the woman?”.
That Amar Sathe thinks and acts so fast seems a little inconsistent given the way his placid persona pans out, but that is nowhere as illogical as Aditi having a specific friend who happens to be in the right place! And above all, especially for a story that has a lawyer as protagonist, the use of a certain term for a crime that is actually one of a different kind is a bloomer, but this misnomer is maintained right until the end.
This haphazard scripting undoes everything about this series, which at 168 minutes becomes another cockeyed and addlepated “rehash” of an edge-of-the-seat film that still did make the box-office cut 35 years back. But that was due to a very conventional audience that did not relish its “solution”. If inspiration had to be taken, it could have been more sensibly done considering which changes should have been made and which not!
Sharib Hashmi as Ved is effective, but the show is stolen by Aamir Dalvi as the no-nonsense yet sympathetic cop. Ebadat Hussain as Tia is a charmer, especially in her last scene. Anupriya Goenka is strictly alright, and the rest have nothing much to do, though Maalin Dhairya Ashar makes a mark as constable Godbole.
As mentioned above, the series falters at the scripting and thus also directorial level (as directors must approve the scripts) and though the story in the climax does elicit sympathy for both father and daughter, the preponderance of (avoidable) flaws dims things considerably.
This one’s strictly average.
Rating: **1/2
ZEE5 presents Juggernaut Productions’s Khoj—Parchaio Ke Uss Paar Produced by: Aditya Pittie, Samar Khan, Umesh KR Bansal & Pragati Deshmukh Directed by: Prabal Baruah Starring: Sharib Hashmi, Anupriya Goenka, Aamir Dalvi, Ebadat Husain, Kriti Garg, Hutoxi Patel, Maalin Dhairya Ashar, Ravi Kant Sinha, Himakshi Bohra, Ravirra Bhardwaj & others
(Used with permission)
