OTT Review: Aranyak

This one has had its share of bouquets and brickbats: while certain critics heaped praises on Aranyak for its unusual break of formula and its elegiac tone, many have lambasted it, calling it downright silly. My immediate impression about the serial — which records a sort of comeback for yesterday’s oomph girl Raveena Tandon — was that it borrows heavily from European crime thrillers (and by Europe, I am also referring to the British catchment, never mind Brexit) in its distinct setting: the popularisation of a small-town hemmed in by woods where bodies pile up.

The male protagonist Angad Malik (played by Bengali actor Parambrata Chattopadhyay) gets a limited-period posting as an SHO at a police station in a sleepy hill station called Sironah, somewhere in north India. He comes — like they all do, the detectives in Nordic/British thrillers — with a baggage. He’s also a misfit because he hails from the city, and considered too polished. The reason why he’s snagged the posting is because the current SHO Kasturi Dogra (Raveena Tandon) is taking a sabbatical to spend time with family: a sulky husband she has outgrown, two children (including a hormonal teenage daughter) and father-in-law Mahadev Dogra (played by Ashutosh Rana, probably the tour de force of Aranyak), who used to be a police officer himself.

On the first day of the handover, an eerie crime is committed. A French (tourist) girl is first reported missing and then her body is discovered in the forest, mauled — from the looks of it — by an animal. This promptly sets off a “legend” from the past when the bodies of a few women were recovered in a similar state decades ago, at a time when Mahadev was in the police force, and the town people had started talking about sightings of a half-man half-beast who roamed the woods and killed women (Mahadev is a firm believer in the spectre, who, he points out, is out to kill at times when the moon is in conjunction with cosmic alignments).

The two lead characters — two, because Kasturi has predictably cut short her leave of absence since she needs to ‘prove’ herself — of course don’t believe in the hocus pocus and begin an investigation.

sushmita@khaleejtimes.com