The trailer for Student of the Year: After Dark has finally arrived. The new show is arriving on November 13, 2026, on JioHotstar, and it features Shanaya Kapoor playing the lead role.
While St. Teresa is back this time, the makers have clearly shifted away from the college romance to focus on thrill and suspense. Since this is releasing directly on OTT, it doesn’t have to deal with the pressure of delivering something good in terms of box office numbers.
But the question is whether the trailer creates any excitement to watch the show. The presentation of the storyline is quite decent. However, everything else looks very confusing and, to some extent, copied at the same time.
The main plot is good, where a sister has arrived at an institute to find out the reasons leading to her death. Here is where audiences are expected to play the guessing game, since there are multiple suspects and their behavior shows that each one of them has a motive to kill the girl.
The secret competition that is referred to at the end of the trailer is expected to open up the suspense behind the murder. However, the makers might have made the wrong choice here to copy Squid Game, and even the outfits that are worn during the game hint at this fact.
Apart from all this, the main storyline seems to be copied from the hit Netflix series, 13 Reasons Why, which focused on the suicide of a girl who leaves behind some tapes, speaking up about the situations that forced her to kill herself.
Moreover, the sister of the victim investigating the matter is something that is hard to digest. Bringing a police officer to a story that focuses on young boys and girls could have been a wrong choice. So instead of this, maybe the makers could have opted to make a slasher film, something similar to Prom Night.
The trailer has been released two weeks before the show arrives on the small screen. Clearly, people are going to get a lot of time to digest the concept and then maybe binge-watch the show if the initial episodes are engaging.
Shanaya Kapoor’s journey so far in terms of her acting career has not been so good. While her big-screen efforts have failed, she is now trying her luck on the small screen, which is something that all the actors are doing nowadays.
She is looking different this time with that short hair, and probably the makers have hidden a side of her that will be loved by the viewers. Let’s wait and see if audiences are going to accept her this time.
