While the tastemakers of Bollywood have shifted their focus to love and romance in the darkness of theatres, they continue to serve slices of the dark ages in the brightness of living rooms. What started as an avenue for experimentation, OTT content is increasingly becoming predictable and phoney.

With self-censorship limiting the options for subversion, long-form content with decorative layers is becoming tiresome to watch. The latest is Yash Raj Entertainment’s largely incoherent iteration of a cult’s commitment to recreate its god out of the flesh and blood of a select group of residents in the quaint area. Someone’s murder is someone’s sacrifice. Someone’s god is someone’s demon. We get the gist, but the mood, mystery, and message take a long time to align.

Created by Gopi Puthran, who, having made the chilling Mardani universe, knows more than a thing or two about telling stories of women surviving a violent, patriarchal world. Here, he puts them at the centre of conflict, but the chill feels cosmetic.

The eight-episode series makes a promising start. Vikram Singh (Vaibhav Raj Gupta), a suspended Delhi Police officer, returns to his native town only to find a torso-less corpse floating in the pond. Vikram is nursing a childhood trauma when he lost his brother, and his mother had mysteriously disappeared. The murder investigation gives him hope that he may be able to join the dots. Gopi and his team of writers have other plans, though. In an attempt to create an intricate narrative, they end up making it dense and obtuse, which feels unintelligent and deliberate.

They drop a string of puppets who are hard to empathise with or root for. Instead of establishing the character, the storyline moves from the past of one character to the present of another, creating false tension and superficial pain. There is Ananya Bhardwaj (Surveen Chawla), a local politician with royal antecedents and a parasitic husband. She is tormented by a pair of Yadav brothers whose arc is erased before it takes shape.

A mysterious priest keeps returning with a machine that doles out wishes as long as you’re willing to have your thumb chopped off. Then there is a modern psychic (Raghubir Yadav), who can read the mind of shadows and an English-speaking oculist, Jimmy Khan (Jameel Khan). The characters appear to have been written so that the audience doesn’t have to rely on subtitles for the translation of Sanskritised Hindi, and the characters convey the writers’ intention on their sleeves.

Between the disjointed introductions and flimsy character arcs, we’re introduced to supercop Rea Thomas (Vaani Kapoor), who sees a pattern in ritualistic killings. Like Vikram, she is also running away from her inner demons but finds herself dealing with a fresh set of ghosts.

Peppered with gore and grime, the violence in the series dulls the senses. The camera voyeuristically captures headless bodies and trunkless heads to keep the audience in a state of shock. Even kids are used to manipulating emotions. Written like a pulpy mystery novel, the story goes back and forth so many times that it seems that the makers are keen on keeping the audience baffled.

When it becomes apparent that no one can stop the killings, come what may, you, like the stupefied police personnel in the series, are reduced to hapless spectators scoring the head count. The wish machine and its mumbo jumbo logic don’t hold and become vicariously funny.

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It is only by the seventh episode that the context of the mystery crystallises and the puppets start making sense. Until then, we, like the members of the secret society, only struggle to make heads and tails of the patchy screenplay. If a series spends six episodes building up and dropping hints, there is something wrong with storytelling.

A long series also challenges the actors to maintain a facade. Cast in a dual role, Vani impresses as the physicist Nandini, but when it comes to playing the cop, she struggles to generate sparks in an unyielding investigation. Surveen also carries a puzzled look. As for us, we keep asking who these people are and where they come from.

Mandala Murders is currently streaming on Netflix.

Published – July 25, 2025 07:38 pm IST