If dark and twisted crime thrillers and trauma-led violence interest you, you can binge-watch Daldal over the weekend, endorses Divya Nair.
Key Points
- Daldal is a Hindi-language psychological crime thriller.
- The seven-episode OTT series stars Bhumi Pednekar, Indu Mhatre and Chinmay Mandlekar in lead roles.
- Daldal streams on Amazon Prime Video from January 30.
There are cops. There are female cops. And there are cops like DCP Reita Ferreira.
Raw. Brutal. Surviving the scars of a personal trauma. And yet putting up a brave fight. To cleanse the system. Every day.
Prime Original’s latest series Daldal drops as an antidote to the various poorly sketched cops we have seen in recent times. And that’s just one of the many reasons why Daldal is different.
What Daldal is about
Created by Amrit Raj Gupta, Daldal is based on Vish Dhamija’s book, Bhendi Bazar.
In the OTT series, Mumbai Crime Branch’s youngest DCP Reita Ferreira (Bhumi Pednekar in one of her career best performances) races against time to stop a brutal serial killer from claiming his next victim, while also dealing with patriarchy, subordination and fighting prejudice to sustain her promotion.
Challenging Reita is a serial killer who has an identical personal journey to a traumatic childhood.
The beauty of Daldal is how the makers present the personal growth and transformation of two children united by the same trauma, yet one of them ends up as an antagonist.
The star cast of Daldal
It’s been a while since we have missed watching Bhumi Pednekar tap into her acting prowess. Daldal more than makes up for that by giving us a cop template that challenges your imagination.
When DCP Reita Ferreira imagines stuffing raw chicken into a man’s mouth, you get a sense of how eerily fractured her mind is. Then she goes ahead and does something that will blow your mind away.
She gets her anger from her mother Isabel (Vibhawari Deshpande). Samara Tijori as Anant/Anita is subtle and flawed, but sinister.
The supporting cast is equally brilliant: Anant Mahadevan as Manohar Swamy, an activist who feeds strays, Chinmay Mandlekar as Vikram Sathe, Sandesh Kulkarni as Sanjay Deshpande, and many more.
But if there is one role and actor that triumphs this series with her performance, it has to be the genuineness with which Geeta Agrawal Sharma plays Indu Mhatre — a constable who balances the role of a doting mother at home and someone who admires and yet is at the receiving end of her young senior at work.
Throughout seven episodes ranging 25 to 45 minutes long, as the layers of everyone’s personality peels off, and you watch the serial killer get the advantage, you are just as invested as you were in the first episode. And that’s not easy to achieve.
Is Daldal worth a watch?
If dark and twisted crime thrillers and trauma-led violence interest you, you can binge-watch this series over the weekend. If gore and messy crime scenes are not your thing, you can skip to the good part where you see Bhumi Pednekar give you Mardaani vibes but with a swag that’s distinctly her own.
Daldal streams on Amazon Prime Video.
