Stream Barun Sobti's Kohrra, Skip Kajol's The Trial

Kohrra: Ambitious Police Procedural Is Rewarding — & Disturbing

This is #CriticalMargin, where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows.

Dir: Randeep Jha

Cast: Barun Sobti, Suvinder Vicky

IN the Indian streaming landscape, there is hardly a genre as versatile as the police procedural. The image of officers in uniform has become central to narratives, either as a means to explore the crime topography or examine the diverse polarity of the country. Unlike feature films which continue reducing them to stereotypes, long-form storytelling lends them the space to be people; the precarity of their position, standing as they are at the cusp of law and lawlessness, opens up the space to tell a larger story about the system. Writer Sudip Sharma has been crucial in this transition. His work across mediums, comprising Paatal Lok (2020) and Udta Punjab (2016) among others, are defined by their expansive look through the intrusive lens of procedure.

Kohrra, the terrific new show written by Sharma, Gunjit Chopra and Diggi Sisodia, is seemingly cut from the same cloth. On a foggy morning in Punjab, a young NRI man is found dead. His throat has been slit and his head disfigured by a boulder. The high-profile incident triggers an extensive investigation helmed by sub-inspector Balbir Singh (Suvinder Vicky) and his subordinate Garundi (Barun Sobti).

The suspects are plenty. Paul (Vishal Handa) had come from London to get married. The woman he was betrothed to, Veera, was involved with her musician lover till the longest time. The car in which Paul’s corpse was found had a dent, signaling an attempt to kill him in the past. As the cops keep digging, more revelations unfold. The CCTV footage reveals a bus had intentionally hit his car a couple of days back, and its driver was seen with Happy, Paul’s sheltered cousin. One’s successful career as a lawyer in London made the other feel small, unseen even by his own father (Varun Badola) back home.

The Trial: Kajol's The Good Wife Adaptation Is Guilty Of Misdirection

An amateur courtroom drama.

Dir: Suparn Verma

Cast: Kajol

Stream on: Disney+ Hotstar

THE current abundance of Hindi web shows, clogging the pores of streaming platforms, has made me a superstitious person. Every week comes an eight-episode series that is seven episodes too long, bearing the aesthetic of a music video and possessing the depth of a Honey Singh song. Every week I tell myself, this is clearly the worst. And then something else arrives, like it can sense my naive optimism, and unfolds as an affront to all the senses. Suddenly, the title of ‘worst’ changes title, as I stare helplessly at the screen. I know better now, having learnt my lesson. Thus, the only adjective I will use for Suparn Verma’s The Trial, the new eight-episode series streaming on Hotstar, is bad. Very bad.

The Trial, like most respectable series on the site, is an official adaptation of a foreign-language show. In this case, Verma has based his outing on the supremely popular drama The Good Wife. The multiple Emmy-winning Julianna Margulies-starrer series centred on a wife waking up to her cheating husband as the latter gets embroiled in a sex scandal. Much of the popularity of the sprawling seven-season series (2009-2016) rested on the accuracy with which it held a scalpel to a public phenomena — a high-profile man found guilty of being unfaithful — and unravelled as a private portrait of the wife compelled to remain ‘good’ and defend her husband despite adversity. The network series’ refusal to victimise its protagonist spawned a moral ambivalence that accounted for its persistent allure.

Verma’s work, farcical in its inclination for melodrama, is immune to words like ‘ambiguity’, ‘nuance’, ‘crisis’ ‘affecting’. Instead, it is a masterclass in taking an immensely watchable premise and botching it up beyond recognition. The Trial is so poorly conceived and nonsensically executed, so inefficiently adapted that it makes promotional videos look better in comparison.

— ISHITA SENGUPTA

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