Dahaad – drama series review

Amazon prime has netter a winner this time with Dahaad. The hindi series which is about a serial killer has all the makings of a decent thriller and is quite engaging. The story takes place in Rajasthan and with all the killings happening across the state, the length and breadth of the region is covered in the 8-part series with the investigating officers present in one region alone. It is like Mylapore E1 station inspector and his deputy investigating killings across TN, from Thirunelveli till Thirutani !! The investigating team in the series, even get to travel across state to Mumbai and Goa in search of the culprit, which begs the question of why the agencies in the respective states or stations are not involved in a manhunt of such a big scale and for a case involving nearly 30 murders!! Having chosen Rajasthan as the base, the director has added the caste prejudices, backward class clashes and challenges, inter religious marriages and honor killings associated with that, as garnishments that does nothing to the main story line. The lead character being a heroine only props up the feminist angle to a certain extent and even she is addressed as “Sir” throughout the series!! With a running time of almost 8 hours across the season, this is possibly the longest drama series ever with less than ten-episode count. Guess they literally didn’t edit anything and aired whatever scenes that were shot!! Every episode has at least 5 minutes dedicated to show the bike driving skills of Sonakshi and despite being repetitive, the sequences involving how the killer traps his victims are shown in every single episode. That it becomes tedious beyond a point of time is a given! The timeline of the story is another confusing point with the killings happening over a 12-year window, but the investigations show it almost like a recent event. Which of the incidents happen in past and which are current is not clear. Also, the ease with which the killer traps his victims make it all too simple. They do show couple of instances where he fails to make a connect but the “wow” factor goes missing despite so many repeats of the same sequence. For any murder mystery, the “who”, “how” and “why” are most important. In this series the “who” is revealed almost immediately while the “how” is shown numerous numbers of times. For a series that took 7 hours and 45 minutes to reach its climax, the last 15 minutes hardly does justice to the “why” part. For a killer who has been roaming around, making a killing for over a decade with more than 30 victims, the ending didn’t feel justified and the reason why he became such a person was never explained at all! Performance wise its Vijay varma show all the way. No one couldn’t have played the simple yet creepiest looking serial killer better!! Such is the impact of his performance that even on scenes where he plays the normal version of his persona, he oozes creepiness and makes his character immensely hate able. Sonakshi with the next big screen time does the wooden, serious looking policewomen from backward class role, who just have to stare angrily at everyone and even in romance scene’s role, pretty well. The person who plays her boss looks like cheap version of Siddarth Malhotra and he could possibly give Vijay varma a tough fight for being creepy if there was an equivalent role. The blank stares that precede every dialogue of his makes one wonder if the culprit will look like him in real world!! Overall, despite the logic skips and longish run time, such a serial killer premise is quite new to Indian movie/drama series industry. Had it been tweaked a bit with little more depth as to why he took up killing, this would’ve made the benchmark for other series to follow. Nevertheless a decent attempt which for sure would lead to many spinoffs.

P. S Dahaad means "roar" It seems. Couldn't make sense of the relevance though!