What a view | Amazon Prime’s Breathe: Into the Shadows asks how far would you go to save the ones you love?
- The grimly fascinating Indian crime-thriller follows a family ripped apart after their daughter is kidnapped
- Abhishek Bachchan takes the lead as a tormented father who is forced into depravity to save his six-year-old
It’s murder, being a parent. Just ask Dr Avinash Sabharwal (Abhishek Bachchan), tormented leading man in Breathe: Into the Shadows (Amazon Prime, series one now streaming).
Avi is the doting daddy of six-year-old Siya. Her mother Abha (Nithya Menen) supplies the other half of the perfect marriage, which is destined to succumb to the pressures of any parent’s second-worst nightmare: the kidnapping and holding to ransom of their child by a possible psychopath, whose motives for his abominable behaviour remain unclear.
What is clear, however, is that to save his young daughter, the kidnapper demands that Avi turns killer and murders an innocent man, thereby partly answering the question at the heart of this grimly fascinating crime-thriller: how far will you go to save those you love?
Once he starts playing the kidnapper’s warped mind games, there’s no way out for Avi, whose other role, as Delhi psychiatrist and expert prosecution witness in criminal cases, clearly has great bearing on his present predicament, although that’s not something to be given up early or cheaply in the story.
And even before Avi becomes a puppet dancing to the kidnapper’s tune, despair comes calling with the realisation that Siya, a diabetic, is running out of insulin; and that Avi and Abha’s serene suburban life has disappeared forever, somewhere within the dead-eyed stare she gives a husband she holds responsible for this torturous calamity.
This second outing for the Breathe franchise keeps viewers sufficiently engaged in its flawed and all-too-human characters to weather any occasional dramatic predictability, the series abetted in this ambition by a beefy Amit Sadh, who returns as Kabir Sawant.
A taciturn senior inspector with a shady past, Sawant is the outlier here, the gruff cop who might yet show some understanding of Avi’s plight – or just engage WWE smackdown mode and lock him up forever.