Black, White & Gray: Love Kills

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.

Four murders. In four different places. The victims: a minister’s daughter (Palak Jaiswal), a young adult; a private cab driver (Hakkim Shahjahan); his passenger, a senior police officer (Tigmanshu Dhulia) with temporary blindness caused by a welding burn; a random kid who’d shot a video of the alleged killer pulling the body of the cop. The killer, a young 20-something (Mayur More) whose name is kept gray, perhaps in an attempt to make the limited series not seem an apologetic thriller that makes one community come across as victims of a prejudiced system. The son of the politician’s driver, he’s soon dubbed a serial killer and has been on the run for two years.

Rich Girl meets Poor Boy. An affair brews. She is a powerful politician’s daughter; he is her driver’s son. They elope. A fleeting romance mutates into star-crossed love. Her family is not impressed. The sinister search begins. You know this young couple is doomed, because the trauma of watching the first segment of Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha (2010) and Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat (2016) is still fresh. It’s a tragedy as old as time.

There are flashes of familiarity in Black, White and Gray—Love Kills in the broad thematic connections it is attempting at, between young lovers on the run, and the obstacles that come in their way. Patriarchy, parental opposition, class differences, power structures, are all present in this crime drama, reminding you of several others that have come before. But it stands out in the way it takes us along the ride, joining and erasing the dots, while creating vivid portraits of its characters and societal mores. I watched the six episodes of about 40-45 minutes each in a single gulp, because it got me invested in the people it was tracking, and wanted to know what happens next. Yes, there are contrivances — the structure of a documentary filmmaker speaking to ‘real’ people, with a parallel track being played out by those standing in for them, is the biggest of them all — and a few slack, improbable patches, but they are not deal breakers.

The six-part series Black, White & Gray - Love Kills looks at a string of murders by a young man in suspicious circumstances and tries to peel back the layers of the alleged truth. The crime thriller by Pushkar Mahabal takes a unique approach by dissecting the story into a dramatisation and a documentary. It decides to be impartial and present the versions of the ’truth’ to viewers, letting them decide. However, the storytelling twists work only up until a point, and dual perspectives may leave some confused. A faceless British journalist named Daniel Gray (voice of Edward Sonnenblick) is piecing together the story of a trail of murders in Maharashtra after a young couple goes missing. The young woman (Palak Jaiswal) is the daughter of a powerful politician (Anant Jog), while the young man (Mayur More) is the son of his driver. From the parents of the couple to innocent bystanders-turned-victims in the crime spree, the story looks at how the young man becomes the scapegoat of the whole affair. But at every point, there’s just enough leeway to make you doubt each version of the ’truth’ we are seeing.