Mandala Murders: An Ambitious Series That Sabotages Its Own Potential

IN A SCENE FROM Netflix’s Mandala Murders, an older man walks into a police station to inform the incumbent detective that the next death in the spate of serial murders happening around town will be his. “I’ve seen death,” he coyly declares to the officer. In most stories, policemen embody our sense of rationale, the reluctance at least not to be manipulated by the mythology of what’s being built around us. In this show, however, not one but two troubled investigators fail to question the surrealism that is both the show’s mystery and its chief creative device. It’s why a series so ambitious and intriguing in parts, fails to rise above the narrative flagstaff of a game of dungeons and dragons. For all its promising ideas, and courageous world-building, what Mandala Murders could have actually used — ironically enough — is a bit of realism.

The story is set in the fictional Charandaspur, a town where modernity and tradition live at Banaras-esque odds. The locals hang on to superstitions while their dilapidated homes are rented by hippies from the West. Vikram (played by a committed Vaibhav Raj Gupta) is visiting Charandaspur with his father, years after a personal tragedy led to the disappearance of his mother. Torn and traumatised, his arrival is complicated by a spate of mysterious murders in town. As if Vikram’s plight weren’t dire enough, his fiancée is in a coma back in the city. With her older sister Ananya (Surveen Chawla) — who nurses political ambitions — he shares a tepid but tantalising romantic history. It’s one messy life alright. Vikram is joined by city-reared Rea (Vaani Kapoor) — an upright, near-expressionless detective with little time to waste. The two join hands to get to the bottom of what ought to have initially been pushed back in theory, before being chased as procedure.

After the first body floats up to the ghats of Charandaspur, severed and put together in the ugliest of ways, a myth as old as the place arrives with it: The myth of the Yasta cult which features a band of women, a machine that grants wishes in exchange for a thumb, a world where sword-wielding assassins walk the earth, middle-aged men talk of cults with the self-seriousness of Indiana Jones, lives are spared with as much ease as they are sacrificed, and police officers readily believe the hyperbole they are sold. The investigation into the symbols that denote the chain of events itself is interesting, but it is dragged down by the unspecific nature of some of the interpersonal dynamics. Vikram’s chase for his missing mother is swept aside by a barrage of sub-plots. His relationship with Ananya, and her political journey, feel misplaced. Rea’s presence gives the sense of a sparkling paperweight, a needless accessory that fails to even add an outsider’s dimension to this intimate view of a conflicted world. Her gaze is airtight, but she’s just as gullible as the insiders.

Directed by Gopi Puthran and Manan Rawat, Mandala Murders has a promising lineup of performers. It’s ambitious, has a sense of scale and can conjure an emotional wave when needed. What it lacks is the maturity of balancing its mythology with the realism of its many troubled characters. It’s a minor miracle that Vikram keeps his head, after being savaged by the encore of one disastrous loss after another. It’s ugly, chilling, and borderline gruesome. To which effect, he’s really the only sensible protagonist for a show that demands either the abandonment of belief or a personal story so intense you’d willingly submit to excursions that are about someone else’s pain. While the latter is almost all on point, the show is largely undone by its need to spell out its ideas — from symbols to symbolism, rituals to the rickety relationships that become the background of a history lesson.

But Mandala Murders must also be applauded for filling a rather shallow pool of genre storytelling that’s either too risque or too distant still, in Indian streaming. Stories that wish to merge fantasy, religion and fiction have potential but they are obviously also hamstrung by the irksome politics of our age. Any creator with a wildly aphoristic idea must first contend with intolerance before tackling intent: the fact that stories must first be disclaimed before they are told. It’s why shows like Mandala Murders exist both mysteriously and miraculously.