'Khamoshh...' is a gruesome, jumbled crime thriller that provides nothing but a new definition to mental harassment in movie theatres.

The biggest suspense about the film - what's the serene and lovely Juhi Chawla doing, sporting reading glasses and trying earnestly to look like a criminal psychologist?

No, not that they're a rare breed in Hindi films. But she brings a kind of mellowness the shrieking proceedings simply don't deserve.

Then there is Shilpa Shetty, last seen giving a rousing and sensitive performance in "Phir Milenge".

Here, she's back to doing what she's best known for - wriggling her posterior and making a 101 faces into the camera.

In "Khamoshh...", Shilpa plays a prostitute who hitches a ride with Rajeev Singh, who plays the secretary to a music-video floozy (Rakhi Sawant) who gets bumped off midway.

Director Deepak Tijori keeps going into whackily distanced time zones unannounced making the viewer lose track of time.

One minute, we're watching Shetty drive down a barren highway, the next, she's writhing and groaning on the dance floor. Two minutes later, she's back on the highway pouting and peering anxiously into her car's engine space.

Space is a commodity that's again in short premium. The characters crammed into the frames - all murderous and murder-able - and are seen running in and out of a marooned motel.

All the characters are in fits of anger, anguish and a general "fear of the unknown" - the 'unknown', frankly, is quite a commodious term because there is one psychotic convict (Kelly Dorjy) on a rampage and another loony (Makrand Deshpande) in prison.

In one of the scenes, a husband tends to his wife who's rapidly bleeding to death until Rajiv Singh sews her wound with an ordinary needle-and-thread.

"Good job," Shawar Ali observes appreciatively.

Wish we could say the same about Deepak Tijori's cut-and-waste thriller.

"Khamoshh..." has no coherent psychological basis, no clear-headed narrative pattern. And the performances are all uniformly hammy.

For the record, there are no conventional romantic pairs, no weepy mothers and long-suffering sisters. But yes, there are plenty of dead bodies...and two item songs by the sexy Shilpa.

Newcomer Rajiv Singh, however, stands out with his split-personality debut

One of the characters in the film compares the murders happening around him, to ones in the old whodunit "Gumnam".

But the makers of "Gumnam" would be hard pressed to recognize "Khamoshh..." as an offshoot of their product.

Times have changed. Shilpa Shetty has the guts to play a smoking, swearing tart.

But when it comes to the dance floor she's back to her regular act.