Kaalkoot Review: A tepid small-town thriller sans distinctiveness

2.5/5

Story: This crime series revolves around Ravi Tripathi (Vijay Varma), a sub-inspector in the town of Thana Sarsi in Uttar Pradesh. He is on the verge of quitting, having no interest in his job, when he is plunged into an acid attack investigation – the victim being a girl his mother wanted him to marry.

Review: Ravi Shankar Tripathi is a reluctant protagonist. In the opening voiceover, he says that he wants to hand in his resignation barely three months into his job as a sub-inspector. What he has witnessed in this short span, he insists, has thrown him off. He is a misfit at the police station. His gentleness and mildness put him as an outlier amidst the barrage of crudity that he is both put through and has to perform in order to perfect the impression of police authority. Ravi is bumbling, and he is witless as to how to navigate and settle into the regular attitudes among the cops. Should he work at adopting them and prove his male ‘masculinity’?

An early scene featuring a gender sensitisation orientation at the station clues us into the real interests that skein the garb of the crime thriller. The jeering and barely suppressed snide laughter is but one of the many forms of responses to the most entrenched gender prejudice the viewer is acquainted with in the course of the show’s painfully overstretched eight episodes. The show is very passionate and invested in scratching out the fault lines of the many patriarchal assumptions that are inseparable from communities, figures of authority, homes, and families. Ravi finds himself gullible and untouched by the coarseness of his workplace, giving off an impression that he is almost above them in his sensitivity and softness. In several ways, Kaalkoot traverses Ravi’s maturing into a person in deeper cognisance of his surroundings, trying to hone our gaze to every fleeting but cutting slight buried in a thoughtless remark; be it in a police officer or a supposed friend. At each turn, the show asks us to reflect on how we have allowed the privilege of hearsay and local chatter as the essential bedrock of our judgments of another human being, particularly of women around us. How do the established notions we have of the relations between men and women mutate into possible vehicles for abetting, normalising, and endorsing violence?

Kaalkoot pays attention to the language and vocabulary that frames men’s imagination of women, including the matrix they have in place for measuring the apposite punishment women must deal with for attracting trouble almost deliberately, as they put it. It is a noble ambition but the show cannot bear the weight of its commentary that keeps broadening. Interspersed with ample helpings of humour, not all of which land (a sore overkill of a gag relating to Census sticking out). One feels that writers Arunabh Kumar and Sumit Saxena have created a show that is stricken with a peculiar paradox. As Ravi gains an interest in the investigation, the case and the key players he comes across remain evidently dull. Even while shuffling through the suspects, the pursuit has an undeniable element of tedium to it; the stakes and the tension do not feel vivid and urgent. Although one may argue that it is intrinsic to the show’s design, it certainly does not excuse the relentless need for the show to tack atop the investigation plodding add-ons, such as political pressure amounting from a home minister and a viral video of his misbehaviour that must be contained.

The plotting gets increasingly and needlessly convoluted, incorporating even a possibly related case of phosphorus poisoning, all ultimately tying back to systemic female discrimination and the sheer perilous condition for women living anywhere. It is as if the writers are not content with one aspect. The artistic greed to cover a lot of ground in examining how women are controlled, how their choice of expression is misinterpreted and used as bait for justifying their treatment, inevitably trips the show into wearing a tone that seems to speak down to us. The narrative heads for elaborate chase sequences and even a shootout that requires a bafflingly inordinate suspension of disbelief. The staging is clumsy and the projection of Ravi in this circumstance invites an immediate contention. Throughout the show, he is built as someone rather content in his ordinariness, gradually acquiring a taste for a more aggressive, ‘manly’ police demeanour. The shootout positions him as no less than a person with superhuman skills of endurance, who gets on a bike and speeds miles in hot pursuit, even after a lethal impaling. The whole sequence does, admittedly, begin with an unexpected dosage of vulnerability and quickly loses all credulity.

There is also structural uninventiveness that plagues the show. Each episode sticks to a template of sorts, beginning with dull bite-sized snippets of nefarious activity and culminating with a song. The faithfulness with which this throughline is adhered to in episodes as many as eight veers to being dull. The sketchiness extends to the way the show handles the men associated with the acid victim, Parul. There is the typical spurned suitor, a love interest who gets dangerously possessive, and an envious, embittered female friend who wades in and out of Ravi’s ambit. While the actors playing them are sincere, the characters do not fully register. Even Shweta Tripathi’s Parul is woefully underwritten. Saxena gets some of the dynamics spot on, especially how Ravi is coached into abrasive masculinity by his superiors, particularly a hectoring SHO, Jagdish. Watch out for a crackling Yashpal Sharma, delightful as Yadav who helpfully reassures Ravi not to take Jagdish’s bullying to heart.

Kaalkoot triumphs most in the scenes between Ravi and his mother (Seema Biswas). Both Vijay Varma and Seema Biswas are excellent actors, but props especially to Biswas for elevating what could have been an uninspired loving-mother model into something that throbs with not just affection but also articulates that need for which she clutches onto her son. The two are endearing together and Biswas brings such a lively, winning charm and warmth. I kept pining for the show to just pivot instead to the mother-son track, while it trudges through the beats of an ineptly executed mystery.

Ravi is devoted to her, who is egging him to consider the marriage proposals she has been scouring for him. The shadow of his father, who passed away recently, hovers heavily over the household. His father was a teacher and a poet, whose poems punctuate the show. They function as a sort of signpost for him, guiding him to see the light in ethics and duty in moments when he is most astray and wavering in belief. Ravi regrets that he was not able to have a much-needed conversation with his father. That missed opportunity haunts him. His approach to his police work, which initially borders on the disinterested and withdrawn and grows into an active re-possession of the space, is constantly weighed and recast through the lens of his engagement with his father’s legacy. It is through his father’s work he finds both purpose and a reckoning with his humanity. The show threads this into Ravi’s journey of discovering his selfhood, surpassing his mental block and expanding the scope for honest conversations, which he couldn’t with his father fulfil in a way with his partner.

Verdict: Vijay Varma is sparkling as a man struggling to find his footing, as the show unpacks the skewed and reckless male containment and repression of female expression a tad too transparently. While there seems to be too much the narrative seeks to encompass, the pacing is stiff and determinedly sluggish. The authenticity and vigour that powers Ravi’s scenes with his colleagues or his mother seem amiss when the show moves to the other motley characters, most of whom blur into a colourless, forgettable patch. For a narrative based on an investigation, the show loses its grip early on, as it careens among the many strands, never quite achieving its intended balance between commentary and tension.