Priyanka Roy

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.

This is the end
Hold your breath and count to ten
Feel the earth move and then
Hear my heart burst again
For this is the end
I’ve drowned and dreamt this moment
So overdue, I owe them
Swept away, I’m stolen.
You may wonder — as you should — why a review of a Mission: Impossible film begins with a Bond theme song. Adele’s famous lines for Skyfall, every word of it true for what is said to be the final M:I film, were playing in my head as I walked in to watch The Final Reckoning. When I came out close to three hours later, my mind silently screamed: ‘This CANNOT be the end’.

If ’thirst trap’ had an eight-episode embodiment, it would be called The Royals. Netflix’s newest offering — a Mills & Boon paperback set in the visually rich world of Indian royalty — has its leading man Ishaan Khatter, dropping his shirt at the drop of a hat. From that first scene of the actor riding a horse on the beach with next to nothing on him, you know that Ishaan is here to satiate the female gaze. Which the actor — earnest, charismatic — manages to achieve to some extent. But I longed for a more brooding, almost Byronic hero. One so tortured by his past that he is unable to forge meaningful relationships in the present. Heathcliff-ian to some extent, perhaps, within as much as the gilded world of The Royals would allow. What we get instead in Ishaan’s Aviraaj Singh is a man child — a poor little rich prince who, when faced with a sticky situation, either shuts himself out or throws a fit or stomps off in anger. Sometimes he does all three together. Always to the viewer’s chagrin.

Dizzying inventiveness — both of the literal and metaphorical variety — is at the heart of Black White & Gray. Distinguished by a daring meta-narrative which turns the so-called tenets of the true-crime genre on its head, this six-part SonyLIV series is perhaps the most ingenious piece of writing seen on Indian screens in a while. Co-created by Pushkar Mahabal and Hemal Thakkar, with the former also doubling as director, Black White & Gray — with the title delving into the good, the evil and, more importantly, the in-between — focuses on the classic poor boy-rich girl trope, but builds a storytelling technique around it that keeps you on the edge of your seat. There are two intertwined strands: a mockumentary about a crime that is supposed to be real, and the restaging of the crime. Both are fictional, but what hits hard is that all of it could well be true.