Delhi Crime Season 3: The Netflix-ication Of The Series Is Complete
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Unlike the previous instalments, this time, the geographical and ethical centres of Delhi Crime are reduced to footnotes in service of a sprawling new season that goes everywhere but heads nowhere. Ishita Sengupta writes.
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FAIRLY EARLY in the new season of Delhi Crime, Vartika Chaturvedi, the famed DCP at the heart of the franchise, is referred to as ‘madam’, a departure from the hybrid ‘madam-sir’ title she carried till now. It’s a slight change but a telling one: although still clad in uniforms, the characters, it appeared, were becoming less dependent on crude identifiers. They were letting loose. But six episodes in, the ease transpires to something flaky that ends up generalising the cops at the expense of familiarising them. This upends Delhi Crime – a rare procedural drama that earned its identity through the distinctiveness of the officers rather than the uniqueness of cases. Across the first two seasons, the crime was a mirror that magnified the ills of the nation but, more lucidly, highlighted the humanity — blind spots included — of the officers in charge. Since its onset in 2019, Delhi Crime explored a city that erred too often and the bastions of law that felt too much. But by the third season, the geographical and ethical centres are reduced to footnotes in service of a sprawling new season that goes everywhere but heads nowhere. Your pop culture fix awaits on OTTplay, for only Rs 149 per month. Grab this limited-time offer now! If this were inevitable, then it should have happened earlier. At its start, the series (helmed by filmmaker Richie Mehta) lent an insider’s perspective to a system that, hitherto in pop culture, was understood in terms of external achievements. And by doing so, it made people out of decorated posts. Although novel, it ran the risk of glorification, which the sophomore season (directed by Tanuj Chopra) course-corrected by acknowledging the prejudice within the force. To forfeit this and lose its intrinsic value is not an impossible lapse, but it's unfitting for a third season. |
Take, for instance, the sweeping nature of the crime at hand. Season 3 opens with Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah) and her punishment posting in Assam. While looking for arms smuggling, she comes across a truck full of women being trafficked. This brings her back to Delhi and initiates an inter-state level investigation. Things get more intense when an ongoing case in the capital, headlined by ACP Neeti Singh (Rasika Dugal), about a fatally hurt child abandoned at AIIMS, overlaps with this and the perpetrators, an underage girl and her husband, go missing. Are you a Delhi Crime fan? Find out some recently released police procedural crime-thrillers on OTT Chopra and writer Anu Singh Choudhary bring a straightforwardness to the proceedings reminiscent of the first season, but scoop out the urgency. Organised trafficking and financially deprived girls being vulnerable to it is not a groundbreaking reality in India, nor is the presence of an injured child left alone at a hospital in Delhi. One would assume that Delhi Crime, unlike a film like Mardaani centring on a similar theme, would look beyond the search for the criminals and explore the greater crime in the country of being a woman. But the series remains rigid in its outline and parades basic facts with the gravitas of existential awakenings. In one scene, Chaturvedi says, “No one misses missing girls.” |
In Rahul Sadasivan’s Cinematic Horror, Society Is The Real Monster |
In Bhoothakaalam, Diés Iraé and Bramayugam, Sadasivan isn’t chasing ghosts; he is diagnosing India. His films aren’t about demons breaking in. They are about the horrors we are already living with, writes Neelima Menon.
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DIÉS IRAÉ opens in Rohan Sankar’s (Pranav Mohanlal) world of inherited wealth, where pleasure is cheap, incentives are endless, and accountability is non-existent. At his mansion party, cocaine, music, and bodies blend into one infinite night. Rohan’s personality fits every cinematic cliché around the rich: fractured paternal equation, reckless routine, pathological aversion to commitment. And Rahul lets us size him up in minutes — he is the classic rich brat. But very soon comes the rupture. When Rohan’s former lover takes her own life after he ends things, instead of guilt, he reacts with a spasm of discomfort, despite knowing exactly what his cowardice has cost. But here is the subversion: he doesn’t transform into a remorseful man. Instead, when the dead lover returns as a ghost to torment him, Rohan reacts with fear mixed with indignation that seemed to say — "How dare her pain follow him into his curated hedonism?” This is where Diés Iraé is intelligent: it refuses the easy redemption arc. The threat of the supernatural doesn’t “correct” him; it merely softens his edges, like a spoiled child realising that the world won’t always bend. Stream the latest Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada releases, with OTTplay Premium's Power Play monthly pack, for only Rs 149. In a way, Rahul Sadasivan flips the genre expectation here. So instead of horror punishing the man into moral clarity, it exposes the vacuum inside him. In the end, he remains recognisable, not rehabilitated, just a little less invincible, and a little more aware that even the rich cannot fully escape the consequences of the wounds they inflict. |
Bhoothakaalam is the other end of Rahul’s spectrum. If Diés Iraé begins in excess, Bhoothakaalam begins in scarcity. For Rahul Sadasivan, horror is not one emotion, but rather a condition of being trapped. Vinu’s (Shane Nigam) world, unlike Rohan’s, is small, stale, and repetitive. His house itself acts like a parasite feeding on stagnation, with suffocating rooms and light that barely enters. You can almost smell that faint old-house odour that sticks to your skin. This is the geography of depression. And the mother-son dynamic is complex and human. Asha’s (Revathy) clinical depression is not played as “monster”, but as a series of coping failures (superiority, nitpicking, emotional blackmail, control), and defence mechanisms that look like cruelty from the outside. And Vinu’s passivity is more about survival, realising that reacting could only escalate the issues. |
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