Priyanka Roy

Rana Naidu is a series about family ties (and often, the lack of it). With the first season being semi-criticised for its overt violence and depiction of gratuitous sex, Season 2 of the Netflix show sees its makers go slightly easy on the former and mostly do away with the latter. The result is eight episodes that perhaps reach out to a wider demographic, but a series that has lost much of its bite. And we don’t mean just in terms of the (rather welcome) clampdown on cuss words. What Rana Naidu does carry forward from one season to the next is the absence of nuance. This is an example of writing, directing and acting which is pretty much on the nose. Subtlety has been a bad word in the world of Rana Naidu, and it continues to be so. Rana Naidu is an adaptation of the American TV show Ray Donovan. A strongly written and stylishly executed series that kept viewers more or less hooked, despite its shortcomings, Ray Donovan benefited greatly from superlative acts by Liev Schreiber and Jon Voight, playing a father and son who cruise through the world of crime with a prickly, unresolved dynamic hanging like the sword of Damocles over their heads.

Set in the same twisty world of the M. Night Shyamalan classic Sixth Sense and Gothika, starring Halle Berry, but far inferior in terms of storytelling and character-building, Tyler Perry’s Straw, nevertheless, makes for a semi-engaging watch. Powered by a central act from Taraji P. Henson, whose character of an underprivileged single mother struggling to stay afloat in a world that is insensitive — and, more pathetically, blind — to her pain and plight, the 105-minute film touches upon some pertinent issues, even as it shows Janiyah’s (Henson) world unravelling in the course of a single day. Those familiar with Perry’s style of filmmaking would know that everything that the actor-director says is always on the nose. Racial discrimination, the trials of the working class, the problems that those who are failed by the system face on a daily basis… Straw touches upon all of them, but with the kind of heavy-handed treatment and dense literal rather than metaphorical depiction that we have seen in Perry’s previous overwrought dramas.

For multiple reasons, it is difficult to write about a film like Housefull 5. The first and the most simple reason is that it is not a film. This is a string of perverse jokes, lewd gags, lame dialogues and loud decibels that play out in a loop over a mostly tortuous 166 minutes. Second, the makers are delusional enough to think this is a film, because of which they have released two versions — ‘A’ and ‘B’ — both of which have the same beginning and middle but different endings. Having endured almost three hours of Housefull A — with no intention of watching Housefull B, even if held at gunpoint — I can safely say that even if 20 more versions of Housefull 5 are released, each of them will be unwatchable.

Diverse — and divisive — worlds collide in Stolen, a film, that powered by its messy core, rips apart the fault lines in society, exposing the ever-growing chasm of class and caste and illustrates how a certain sense of redoubtability has now become the domain of the privileged. Horrific on many levels — though it doesn’t belong to the horror genre — Stolen is one of those films that you won’t be able to tear your eyes away from, immersive as it is in terms of its plot and players as well as in what seems like a narrative terrain that isn’t. That familiarity, unfortunately, stems from the fact that we hear and read about such stories every day — mob fury, kangaroo courts and a system that turns a blind eye and ear to the underprivileged. To sum it up, the lack of empathy is not unfamiliar in this country.

If there was a true-crime embodiment of the saying ‘so near yet so far’, it would be the case that shook America in the early 1980s and continues to intrigue, baffle and scare the world even today. Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders, Netflix’s potent examination of how seven people in Chicago dropped dead after popping pills of Extra Strength Tylenol — a seemingly innocuous pain-relief medication — is a jaw-dropping watch, which, even if you are familiar with the case, has an ace up its sleeve. The three-episode series is the only one, among scores of other programmes on the case through the decades, that manages to get prime suspect (and, in many ways, the only suspect) James Lewis on camera. Lewis, who died in 2023 shortly after (nonchalantly) telling his side of the story, was suspected of picking bottles of Tylenol off shelves, lacing some of the pills with potassium cyanide, resealing them and putting them back in the market.

Given that its basic foundation rests on time-loop, one can’t even accuse Bhool Chuk Maaf of being a rinse-repeat film. What we can definitely point a finger at is how the film — in an oxymoronic way — uses this trope both lazily and laboriously. As a result, what we end up getting is a two-hour watch with endless possibilities let down by limited execution. Bhool Chuk Maaf unfolds in the kind of small-town India that Bollywood has been feeding us for years. Quirky families, oddball players, humour of the kind that has at least one lavatory-laced joke and, more often than not, a character talking and walking (talking more than walking) like Kareena Kapoor’s Geet from Jab We Met.

Even regular watchers of true crime like me will find it extremely harrowing to sit through Fred and Rose West, whose logline of ‘A British Horror Story’ doesn’t even come close to describing what a turbulent ride this newest offering from Netflix is. For those familiar with the gruesome details of the case, the three-part documentary will function as an uncomfortable throwback. For those like me who didn’t know about it at all, Fred and Rose West is yet another (and, by far, most shocking) eye-opener of the depravity that humankind is capable of.

The conversation around Adolescence, the globally-acclaimed show that pierces the zeitgeist to succinctly outline the corrosive impact of online misogyny on the impressionably young minds of teenage boys and the growing threat of the ‘manosphere’, continues to grow. Taking it further is Secrets We Keep, a Danish series that falls on the fringes between social commentary, edgy thriller and a somewhat consistently entertaining binge-worthy watch.