This movie dealt a severe blow to my enthusiasm for Shiny Ahuja. It was dull, moved at a snail's pace, and was punctuated by psychotic screaming episodes from Shiny. Set in southern India, it wasn't a Bollywood movie, having no singing/dancing and all English dialog. But with the studio dubbing and sound quality at the lowest level of pathetic, I was wishing it was subtitled.
Plot spoilers: A country priest (in Kerala) befriends a young woman, gets her pregnant, and has her get an abortion. If this sounds familiar, it's the basic plot line of the controversial Mexican film El Crimen de Padre Amaro, which starred Gael Garcia Bernal. Since I was familiar with that film, and Sins had reached that point after about an hour, I thought the end was in sight. But no, Sins digressed and ended up running 3 hours (I just checked IMDb, it was actually only 138 minutes but believe me it seemed like 3 hours).
It becomes common knowledge in town that she is the priest's woman, she has a couple more abortions while waiting for him to leave the order and marry her, and when he decides not to he has her married off to some guy for the appearance of respectability, becoming insanely jealous that she might actually have sex with her new husband. The crazier he gets, the more interested in her new husband she becomes. Her mother helps her and the husband run away, she gets pregnant, Shiny kills her mother for helping them run away and then has her killed when she comes back to town for the funeral. The cops are onto him after the first murder and he is sentenced to hang. IOW, fun factor = zero.
With a plot like that it should have at least moved quickly, but besides being generally depressing it was slooooowwww, with poor acting, and not enough of Shiny looking even normal, let alone good, to redeem it. There was so much (unerotic) sex, violence and controversial subject matter, it made me suspect it was made just for the shock and titillation value. Any moments of humor were unintentional, like the steam whistle of a teakettle sounding off during a sex scene. Hasn't that been on the Over-Abused Movie Cliché List since at least 1945? And Shiny was very stilted and unnatural in the beginning (not helped by the poor dubbing), and totally OTT when he went off the deep end. A disappointment all around.
Plot spoilers: A country priest (in Kerala) befriends a young woman, gets her pregnant, and has her get an abortion. If this sounds familiar, it's the basic plot line of the controversial Mexican film El Crimen de Padre Amaro, which starred Gael Garcia Bernal. Since I was familiar with that film, and Sins had reached that point after about an hour, I thought the end was in sight. But no, Sins digressed and ended up running 3 hours (I just checked IMDb, it was actually only 138 minutes but believe me it seemed like 3 hours).
It becomes common knowledge in town that she is the priest's woman, she has a couple more abortions while waiting for him to leave the order and marry her, and when he decides not to he has her married off to some guy for the appearance of respectability, becoming insanely jealous that she might actually have sex with her new husband. The crazier he gets, the more interested in her new husband she becomes. Her mother helps her and the husband run away, she gets pregnant, Shiny kills her mother for helping them run away and then has her killed when she comes back to town for the funeral. The cops are onto him after the first murder and he is sentenced to hang. IOW, fun factor = zero.
With a plot like that it should have at least moved quickly, but besides being generally depressing it was slooooowwww, with poor acting, and not enough of Shiny looking even normal, let alone good, to redeem it. There was so much (unerotic) sex, violence and controversial subject matter, it made me suspect it was made just for the shock and titillation value. Any moments of humor were unintentional, like the steam whistle of a teakettle sounding off during a sex scene. Hasn't that been on the Over-Abused Movie Cliché List since at least 1945? And Shiny was very stilted and unnatural in the beginning (not helped by the poor dubbing), and totally OTT when he went off the deep end. A disappointment all around.