BOTTOM LINE
A Bland Investigative Thriller
PLATFORM
ZEE5
RUNTIME
150 minutes (7 episodes)
What Is the Show About?
Bride-to-be Alisha Dixit reunites with her childhood pals, including social media influencer Shalu. Her wedding festivities are abruptly halted when Shalu is found dead under suspicious circumstances. SP Devika Rathore (Shriya Pilgaonkar) is assigned to investigate, and her inquiries quickly reveal that Shalu’s death was a murder, not a suicide. Devika’s investigation uncovers a complex web of secrets.
Performances
Shriya Pilgaonkar’s sincerity in bringing Devika’s resilience to the fore is commendable, though her body language and dialogue modulation are beginning to feel repetitive. Ragini Dwivedi is perhaps the only performer in the lineup to display any genuine emotion without it feeling staged. Kamya Ahlawat wears the same expression throughout and seems to be on a never-ending sobbing spree.
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Analysis
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How do you suck the life out of a genre? By milking it to death or not even making the basic effort to reimagine it, or at the very least, giving it a timely upgrade. Investigative thrillers are usually easy stories to devour, but when OTTs keep churning out one clone after another just because it sells, it drains any joy from the viewing experience. That’s the story of Chhal Kapat in a nutshell.
Chhal Kapat, directed by Ajay Bhuyan, digs deep into the death of influencer Shalu during her best friend Alisha’s wedding. Like every zillionth investigative thriller out there, it’s a murder masked as suicide. The show follows the familiar trope of slowly uncovering the hidden motives of multiple suspects, each revealing more bitterness, rivalry, and betrayal than the last. How does SP Devika Rathore make sense of this mess?
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Hours before tying the knot, Alisha is still torn between her groom-to-be, Jugal and lingering feelings for her ex, Rohan. Shalu, no saint herself, is entangled with an intense lover, Sapan, while her friendships with Ira and Mehek have turned sour. Mehek’s husband, Vikram Chandel, is a snob who uses his clout for personal gain. Meanwhile, Devika is still battling her demons from an abusive marriage.
The show follows the usual tropes of the genre: a cop gathering crucial details around the crime, piecing them together, zeroing in on a suspect, only to discover they’ve been deliberately misled. Each episode offers new dimensions of the tense night leading up to the death, with the narrative planting hints and building a perception that something scandalous is just waiting to be unearthed.
Even if it chooses to be a generic tale that’s content with scraping the surface and playing it safe, the least it could do is handle the finer details more efficiently. The tension around the various possibilities, say, whether the woman was pregnant, or if two people were involved in her murder, is virtually non-existent. There’s no real curiosity or hook to pull you into the next episode.
The narrative lacks much cohesion, making it hard to form a complete picture of any character. Twists come and go at the drop of a hat, and the supposed quest for truth becomes a crushing bore because there’s nothing and no one to truly root for. The real pity isn’t the plot or the premise, but the lack of flair in the storytelling. It doesn’t have fun with the material and takes itself far too seriously.
If there’s any silver lining in this otherwise shallow exercise in generating thrills, it’s the idea of a female cop investigating the death of a woman, offering a rare glimpse into the challenges women face in their line of work, in their relationships, and in enduring toxic environments that steadily erode their identity and sanity. The occasional misunderstanding between Devika and her senior constable over his integrity is another well-conceived moment.
Rather than relegating a few montages of Devika’s past to the end (revealing a new angle to her husband’s death), the creators could’ve interspersed them earlier in the narrative, drawing meaningful parallels between her life and that of the suspects. Chhal Kapat, in its bid to address broader themes, skimps on nuance. The bigger issue: it chooses to remain ordinary and makes no effort to stand out.
Chhal Kapat is a stale investigative thriller that offers nothing new.
Performances by Others Actors
Tuhina Das succeeds in capturing the bitterness that defines Ira’s character, while Yahhve Sharma makes an impression as the not-so-likeable girl who gets killed. Vijay Kaushik, as the constable, gets a few moments to shine, but none of the other male actors are given any roles of real substance. If one were hard-pressed to pick names, Keshav Lokwan and Anuj Sachdeva are passable.
Music and Other Departments?
Soutrik Chakraborty brings the urgency you’d expect from a wannabe cool thriller, though it’s as generic as the execution. Shanu Singh Rajput’s cinematography, however, deserves praise; his framing is picturesque, and there’s enough visual sophistication to hold a viewer’s interest.
The story (by Prakriti Mukherjee) offers nothing new; it might have benefited from a deeper understanding of an influencer’s lifestyle. The screenplay, by Karishmaa Oluchi, is all over the place, filled with twists and surprise elements that feel painfully overused.
Highlights?
A few occasional twists
Good cinematography
The feminist subtext
Drawbacks?
Bland writing and execution
Underwhelming performances
Absence of any novelty, USP to excite a viewer
Did I Enjoy It?
No
Will You Recommend It?
Only if you can’t let your weekend go by without a thriller
Chhal Kapat Show Review by M9
