Student of the Year: After Dark

Remember Karan Johar’s much-loved franchise ‘Student of the Year’, which was all gloss and romance? In its third edition — in the form of a web series — can the franchise be reimagined to shed the glitter and wade into the darker recesses of being young, and still be irresistible? Strangely enough, as two disparate cinematic universes, Karan Johar’s Dharmatic Entertainment and Reema Maya’s indie and individualistic style of filmmaking, collide, the answer is not confusion or chaos. Reema takes the basic template of ‘SOTY’ and turns it on its head. Yes, it’s still the same elitist St Teresa College, where “privileged children are taught how to struggle”. They are still competing for the elusive Student of the Year trophy. Beyond that, Reema, also the co-writer and co-creator of the series along with Debashish Irengbam, invents her own module and plays by her own rules.

It takes a lot to stay level-headed about a bad show, but here goes. Somewhere deep within the edgy-Halloween-party-gone-wrong hollowness of this six-episode riff on Karan Johar’s nepo-induction franchise featuring teeny-bopper colleges and bubblegum love triangles and prestigious annual competitions, there is an idea. It has something to do with the aesthetic of Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’: a schooling system so abusive that the Student of the Year contest is an exclusive Squid Game-like tournament with red jumpsuits designed to make unstable Indian teens destroy each other for a mythical survival-of-the-fittest prize. But it’s a hipster idea so blunted by the folds of ivory-tower storytelling and Instagram-filmmaking that, by the time it emerges, it’s an icy corpse floating under a frozen pond.

“Poori duniya hi jhooti hai (The whole world lies).” There is a line in Student of the Year: After Dark that pretty much sums up the world this show wants to create. And, honestly, it isn’t entirely wrong. Everyone is in a race to win, and when the stakes are high, morality, friendship and basic humanity can take a backseat. The real question is: how far will you go to get what you want? The original Student of the Year, with Varun Dhawan, Alia Bhatt and Sidharth Malhotra leading the campus race, gave us a rather PG version of ambition, popularity, youthful rivalry and relationships. Its latest instalment, SOTY After Dark, wants to take things several shades darker. This time, the Gen Z crowd comes armed with secrets, sinister social media pages, messy relationships and a murder mystery. Except, somewhere between wanting to be a campus drama and a psychological thriller, the show loses its plot. Quite literally, at times.

Almost one-and-a-half decade since Karan Johar’s Student of the Year entered our lives and envisioned college as a swanky theme park for affluent, entitled kids where a token outsider would act as disruptor and stir the status quo whilst participating in a medley of designer labels and fancy musicals. Student of the Year is as frivolous as it gets but grabbed eyeballs for embracing its vanity to the hilt.