Dahaad review

Dahaad Review(Photo Credit –Poster From Dahaad) Dahaad Review: Star Rating: Cast: Sonakshi Sinha, Vijay Varma, Sohum Shah, Gulshan Devaiah, Zoa Morani, and ensemble. Creator: Reema Kagti & Zoya Akhtar Director: Reema Kagti & Ruchika Oberoi Streaming On: Amazon Prime Video Language: Hindi (with subtitles). Runtime: 8 Episodes, Around 60 Minutes Each. Dahaad Review(Photo Credit –Still From Dahaad) Dahaad Review: What’s It About: In a remote town in Rajasthan, a mysterious serial killer is on the loose. The cops are up on duty to find out his identity and catch him red-handed. The entire state is scaled, only to realise that his victims are spread everywhere. How he is caught and what is his motive is what Dahad explores. Dahaad Review: What Works: There is a certain game that writer-director duo Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti want their audience to play. Together these women have defined the cinema of metaphors and retrospection with every project that they did together and respectively. Be it their dedication to making a movie about the Rap culture in Bombay and exploring the world through music and hidden layering ( So when these women decide to make a murder mystery, their focus is definitely not to make you cringe with the goriness of it all, or throw random big twists to bring you to the edge of your seat time and again. Their idea is to make a slow-burning story that not just entertains but acts as a satire of the situation that their show is set in. Dahaad, an eight-part...

Dahaad gets going with a sequence of almost unbearable political import. A harried-looking man comes to the Mandawa police station enquiring about his missing sister. The cops—male and upper-caste, except for sub-inspector Anjali Bhaati (Sonakshi Sinha)—ignore his pleas, saying the girl had eloped of her own accord and there isn’t much they can do. Outside, the man encounters a crowd agitating against entrapment and religious conversions. Joining their ranks, he lies that a Muslim took off with his sister. And just like that, the case is escalated and an investigation commenced. Dahaad, on Prime Video, isn’t telling the Rajasthan story. It’s telling the India story, where real and complex crimes against women jostle for attention with false alarms and politically-motivated fearmongering. Created by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti, the series walks a razor’s edge between depicting the plight of its victims and damning the right of consenting adults to do as they please. There is an obvious villain—a serial killer who lures unsuspecting women online—yet the makers constantly point to a society that enables the exploitation of young girls in the name of ‘protecting’ them. Sonakshi Sinha and Vijay Varma on their ‘jugalbandhi’ in ‘Dahaad’ “Twenty-five years in the service and not a trifling,” grumbles Anjali’s higher-up. “And in one year you’ve landed a serial killer?” That much she has. Across Rajasthan, over a long period of time, 27 women have been found dead in public washrooms...

By Anindita Mukherjee: It’s not every day that you see a woman cop, riding a bullet and kicking it (quite literally), at a taekwondo class. That’s Sonakshi Sinha in a nutshell from Amazon Prime Video’s latest series, Dahaad. Women as protagonists in cop thrillers aren’t too new a phenomenon in the world of entertainment. So, what is it that is different about Dahaad? And not to forget, the near-perfect amalgamation of top male performers in the country in the form of Gulshan Devaiah, Vijay Varma andSohum Shah that strikes the perfect equilibrium. Let’s find out more from our review. Anjali Bhaati (played by Sonakshi Sinha) is a top performer in her taekwondo class. She is sassy, unapologetic and rides a bullet to work. She is a reliable cop and stands out at a workplace predominant with men. Like every middle class story, her mother is after her life to get her to meet potential matches but she turns deaf ear. Anjali doesn’t believe in bribes, is ready to beat men who pass lewd comments and doesn’t believe in bowing down. Basically, the ideal cop everyone sitting in the audience wish for. She is given the task of unravelling a mystery surrounding multiple women being found dead in public toilets. While the deaths appear as suicide, little digging and it comes about that all the dots connect to one direction – a pyscho serial killer. What follows next is an exhilarating cat-and-mouse chase involving police and the attacker. The story of Dahaad is a reflection of all things ...

In the excellent Dahaad, on Prime Video, tough female sub-inspector Anjali Bhatti (Sonakshi Sinha) is assigned to find a young woman who ran off to marry her Muslim boyfriend. In the course of this case, she discovers several missing women around the region of Jaipur in northwestern India. At the same time, there are multiple Jane Does in morgues who have not been claimed. Turns out the victims were from a low caste, and their families never reported them missing because they were ashamed that they “ran off to elope”, or they were happy that their daughters found someone to marry them without a dowry. Although the Jane Does were determined to be suicides, Bhatti declares them to be victims of a serial killer. As in The Fallor Darkness series, the audience is introduced to the killer in episode 1, and we also follow his story. Dahaad focuses on the cat and mouse between the killer and the cops, but is also an indictment of both the enduring caste system and the culture around marriage in India. For more recommendations of The Cops Anjali is a headstrong, smart and fierce detective who is often in trouble with her superior Devi Singh (Gulshan Devaiah). Fortunately, Devi recognizes her talent and defends her to both his superiors and Anjali’s co-workers. Anjali’s beloved father died before the show starts, but he taught her “never to bow to anybody.” He was a state worker, and they are from a backward, as they say, caste. So when the case of the missing women reveals itself, ...

For those who believed in her talent since Lootera, Dahaad is a truly rewarding experience, observes Sukanya Verma. A blurry visual of different stages of a dying bride at the start of every episode serves as a prelude to Dahaad's ominous backdrop and pursuit of a predator at large. Gradually, as the image grows clearer so does the larger picture driving the series. A noxious combination of misogyny, casteism and bigotry polluting the air of small town Rajasthan as it collapses under patriarchy's violent grip lends Dahaad's police procedural its abundant layers and significance. Social commentary and serial killer thriller bundled in one, Reema Kagti and Zoya Akhtar's engrossing eight-part Web series is an intricate study in human behaviour and impulses at the root or receiving end of crime and chaos. Serial killer stories often follow a formulaic template -- troubled individual, traumatic childhood, preying pattern, one tiny slip and it's game over. Predictable as these machinations may be, Dahaad soaks in the method to the madness. Ditching suspense for study, the offender's identity is never really a secret. What interests its writers Kagti, Akhtar, Ritesh Shah, Sunayana Kumari, Mansi Jain, Chaitanya Chopra and Karan Shah is the execution and the environment of a demented mind. A series of women across different parts of Rajasthan show up dead in a public loo -- every single one duped and bumped off the same way, leading a certain cop to believe the mastermind behind al...

In the autumn of 2009, a school teacher Mohan Kumar was arrested from a small village on the outskirts of Mangaluru. Dressed in plain formal clothes, the modest-looking man would teach physical education to primary classes in South Karnataka. He was a family man living a middle-class life with no reason for anyone to suspect. When the gruesome murders of 20 women were uncovered and linked to each other, the police tracked down the serial killer and found it to be the unlikely Mohan Kumar. Shortly after, the story of the serial killer spread and he came to be known as ‘Cyanide Mohan’, for he would elope with women in their mid-20s or early 30s and give them contraceptive pills laced with cyanide and ask them to take it in a public toilet before they went ahead to marry. A few hours later, their dead bodies would be recovered from the public toilets. Actor Vijay Varma, who brings to life this serial killer character as Hindi literature professor Anand Swarnakar in Amazon Prime Video’s Dahaad, plays the role with Kumar’s ease and modesty, yet a passive aggressive approach that convinces the audience of Varma’s intentions. The initial episodes entail the story of two missing women and a made-up case of ‘love jihad’ that is further fuelled by ‘yellow-flagged guardians of the religion’ who want to save their daughters from the clutches of men from another religion (an Altaf). Even as the missing girls are of legal age to marry, they seek justice and the arrest of Altaf, when the...

Plot In a small village in Rajasthan, Sub-Inspector Anjali Bhaati (Sonakshi Sinha) comes across a case where twenty-seven women have been disappearing without a trace, yet the locals seem unfazed. However, everything changes when Bhaati finds a common thread connecting all cases, leading her to suspect a serial killer may be on the loose. This revelation shifts her attention from unexplained disappearances to a well-planned and calculated scheme. Anjali, in her thirties, rebels against the traditional background of her village, making it difficult for her mother to find a suitable marriage proposal. She also faces discrimination due to her caste. However, she remains a strong-headed cop. Two parallel cases emerge, intertwined by fate. A brother from a scheduled caste reports his sister missing. In the other case, inter-caste love blossoms between a village figure's daughter and a Muslim boy. Anjali helps the boy escape and focuses on the other case. She discovers a pattern among the missing girls from scheduled castes: aged above 25, unable to marry due to poverty and lack of dowry, emotionally vulnerable. Tracing the phones to a previous victim, she realizes that 27 girls were killed the day after they ran away with their partners, poisoned with cyanide. While some believe it's a gang, Anjali suspects a lone psychopath. She argues that the killer has adhered to a meticulous plan without making a single mistake. She believes a gang would increase the chances of errors, unl...

A policewoman still in the process of learning the ropes of a high-pressure job is the protagonist of The eight-part show, created by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti and produced by Excel Media and Tiger Baby, is devoid of the visceral and the explosive. It has no major action scenes, no chase sequences and no playing to the gallery by the law enforcers on the trail of a psychopath. What the series does have is the spark to make the most of a classic crime-and-punishment tale rendered as piercing, rooted social chronicle. Resident of a small town in Rajasthan's Jhunjhunu district, the policewoman at the heart of the dark, disturbing story has to contend with caste discrimination, gender prejudice, cases of women gone missing without a trace, threats of honour killings, a nagging mother intent on finding her a suitable boy and a wily, weathered serial killer who leaves no clues. The Dahaad spotlights the grind of police work, the human side of law enforcement, the emotions and family responsibilities that weigh down men/women in uniform, the tyranny of unyielding processes and the burden of debilitating social and political pressures. Directed by Reema Kagti and Ruchika Oberoi and written by the duo with Ritesh Shah and others, Dahaad probes the psyches of the cops engaged in a battle of attrition with a dangerous criminal. A series of women are found dead in public toilets in towns and villages across the state in what appear to be cases of suicide. Sub-inspector Anjali Bhaati...

The mainstream cinematic obsession with overtly stylish, muscular, and vengeful policemen has seen an unlikely growth in the past decade. Who would know this better than Dahaad is currently streaming on Prime Video. It is not the needless rowdiness that takes precedence here as Bhaati goes about her work as an inspector in a room full of male police officers. The focus remains on the matter-of-fact attitude that Bhaati- irrespective of her gender, and caste position--has to go on with her responsibilities. Dahaad, the new series created by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti, fixes its gaze squarely on a small town named Mandwa in Rajasthan. Missing complaints of women in particular are commonplace, with the increasingly volatile situations that occur due to caste-based and love-jihad labels. The first two episodes of Dahaad find itself unable to move past this web of chaotic socio-cultural perils, and in the mix, is only able to build the characters that would take the lead from hereon. A mystery unfolds Bhaati here works with chief Devi Laal Singh (Gulshan Devaiah), and another sub-inspector Kailash Parghi (Sohum Shah). In the midst of this resurfaces the missing girl complaint that was reported almost two months ago, which now on further investigation leads them to strikingly similar chain of events. Where the girl elopes with an unknown lover- with money and jewellery, and leaves behind a letter to the family stating that she has taken the decision herself. Within the next two...