Kaalkoot review: Vijay Varma masterfully spearheads this engaging, well-written thriller on toxic masculinity

Director: Sumit Saxena

Cast: Vijay Varma, Yashpal Sharma, Shweta Tripathi, Seema Biswas, Gopal Datt, Suzanna Mukherjee

Where to watch: JioCinema

Rating: 3.5 stars

There have been shows and films about a righteous cop before. There have been stories on crimes against women before. So, in that sense, Kaalkoot was fighting the burden of expectations right from the get go. Yet, despite being in the centre of a genre that is densely populated, director Sumit Saxena’s crime thriller manages to be fresh, engaging, and even entertaining in a somewhat uneasy way. The show’s success lies largely in its performance and crisp writing that elevate to a must watch despite a shoddy and stretched conclusion.

Kaalkoot is the story of a small-town UP Police sub-inspector (Vijay Varma), who has offered his resignation in just the first three months of his job. Between a nagging mother who won’t stop pestering him for rishtas (Seema Biswas), and a slightly sadistic SHO (Gopal Datt), he is caught between a rock and a hard place. At this juncture, a case lands in his lap, that of an acid attack. And this hesitant cop learns to become what he is meant to be.

It is a coming-of-age story as much as it is a commentary on patriarchy and toxic masculinity. Kaalkoot is part subtle, part in-your-face and knows what it needs to be exactly when. The writing flows effortlessly and the plot moves quickly. The 30-35-minute episode lengths are a respite and despite the relatively shorter runtime, each character gets a chance to shine and be relevant. The writers get a lot right – from the lingo to the ambience of a tier-2 city of UP, seeped in casual patriarchy. But they get a few things wrong too, but we will get to that a bit later.

No questions asked, Kaalkoot is an uneasy watch. For a series about a crime as ghastly as an acid attack, it needs to be. One needs to feel the pain of the survivor and the uneasiness of this reluctant cop, who – like us – has never something like this in his life. The show is meant to evoke those sentiments and it does it quite effectively. And an effective tool in that direction is the show’s music, particularly its original songs that usually come towards the end of each episode, almost each time perfectly matching the tone.

But even as the show is talking about a crime, it stays real. The personal life of our protagonist is interwoven into the narrative quite well. Granted, sometimes all subtlety is chucked out of the window and the parellels become too obvious and look too forced, but they never feel unnatural. The realism and awkwardness in his conversations with women, particularly his betrothed (Suzanna Mukherjee) are perfectly depicted.

But the show loses focus as it is about to reach its conclusion. The final episode is long-drawm over-dramatised, and suddenly decided to abandon all realism and nuance for an action-filled climax with fistfights and lots of gunfire. The stark change in tone is jarring and even baffling because till now, Kaalkoot has been setting up to be a different kind of show. Just why it decides to go down the ‘run-of-the-mill’ road is a puzzling choice. This is the second show after Dahaad where I have been annoyed by a good show being (almost) ruined by a crappy end. Yet, it is the writing and emphasis on characters and not incidents that pulls it back to have a redeeming conclusion in the end.

To say that this show belongs to Vijay Varma would be slightly unfair to the other actors. Vijay is sublime and – to borrow a sporting phrase – in the form of his life. He breathes life into ASI Ravi Shankar Tripathi and shows that apart from the creepy villains, he has it in him to play the good guy too, and with great panache and flair. Among the supporting cast, those who shine are Seema Biswas and Gopal Datt. The latter, cast against type, as a somewhat perverted senior cop, is a revelation, far away from his comedy world, and yet leaving an impact. Yashpal Sharma as Ravi’s man FridayYadav ji is also a delightful watch. Shweta Tripathi as the victim Parul has liited screentime but she justified that by bringing to the table a measured and sensitive portrayal of an acid attack survivor.

When OTT had begun in India almost a decade ago, it was populated almost exclusively by slice-of-life dramas. It was a few years later that crime thrillers took over. In the years since, they have saturated the medium so much that there seems hardly anything new. Kaalkoot comes at a crucial juncture to dispel that notion, and hats off to director Sumit Saxena and co-creator Arunabh Kumar for it. It is a revival of the genre that has been most successful in the Indian streaming space but has been lagging for some time now.