Netflix India is having quite the crummy year when it comes to its slate of original shows. In hindsight, the watered-down, well-packaged, eager-to-please ambient TV comforts of shows like Khakee: The Bengal Chapter and Dabba Cartel are starting to feel like “the good old days”. Their latest, Mandala Murders, threatens to dethrone The Royals as the streamer’s worst show of the year thus far. Perhaps ever.
Forget notions of 'good' or 'bad', or terms like 'watchable' or 'bingeable', it took me four entire episodes to be able to even understand, let alone articulate, what the central plot of this show is.
But who knows, maybe writing about it will help the pieces fit into place and allow me to find some coherence within the chaotic narrative.
A Blur of Cults and Corpses
Suspended Delhi Police officer Vikram Singh (Gullak’s sincere Vaibhav Raj Gupta) returns to his sleepy hometown of Charandaspur, which holds many memories and truckloads of trauma. When he was a child, his younger brother passed away, and his mother mysteriously disappeared.
As Vikram settles back into the rhythms of home, one morning, a mutilated corpse floats by, thereby kicking off a murder investigation into a series of bizarre ritual killings.
The corpse in question is a man’s four limbs surgically stitched to his decapitated head, with his torso missing.
It sounds scary, but it’s an unintentionally comical sight that, like much of this show, doesn’t quite instill the dread it’s going for.
Vikram’s reaction to the said refashioned corpse is casual indifference. He dives straight into investigation mode without showing much shock at the sight. He feels less like a real person and more like a fictional character just waiting around for a plot to float by him. He also believes this murder is somehow linked to his mother’s disappearance decades earlier.
Okay, cool, so we have a templated tortured cop who discovers a brutal murder in his creepy hometown. Sounds simple enough, right? Surely that sets the stage for another straightforward, moody, murdery mystery? If only.
What follows over the next few bizarrely-plotted, terribly-structured episodes is a blur of politics, potential ghosts, gangsters, spirits, shady priests, creepy cults, corpses., kaala jadoo, missing children, and mystical mumbo jumbo.
Make a Wish, Lose a Thumb
Not to mention a string of characters that the narrative assumes we care about, considering it does a terrible job of establishing them in the first place. There’s Ananya Bhardwaj (a surprisingly sauceless Surveen Chawla)—a local politician. There is a pair of gangster brothers who the series keeps insisting are significant, even though they’re barely established.
There’s also a creepy priest in the middle of the forest, with a machine that grants magical wishes—as long as you’re willing to have your thumb chopped off.
Towards the end of the pilot episode, I thought the lack of coherence and the jumpy, disjointed randomness was intentional—because that’s when we’re introduced to supercop “CIB” officer Rea Thomas (Vaani Kapoor), who seems to see a pattern in the killings and asks to lead the case. “Now that she’s entered the chat, things will start making sense”, the show seems to say. If only.
Also, Rea thought she could run away from her demons, but she can't. We know this because she literally says, “I thought I could run away from my demons, but I can’t." Said demons include the guilt of a case gone wrong, which cost the life of a young girl (kids dying are like a Tuesday on this show).
Moody Mystery? More Like Mystical Mayhem
Mandala Murders marks Netflix’s second collaboration with Yash Raj Films, after the effective The Railway Men. But unlike that show, this one, from creator Gopi Puthran (Mardaani 2), flounders and fumbles on the absolute basics of storytelling: establishing the world, plot, and characters.
It’s an unintentional masterclass in how not to lay the foundation for an eerie mystery and build intrigue.
The ambition here is (almost) admirable, of building a dense everything-is-connected narrative involving multiple overlapping characters, their childhoods and shared trauma. But the execution is baffling.
The way the show’s various strands and arcs come together is that, for the longest time, they don’t. More than a focused, coherent narrative flow, what we get are disjointed, blurry blotches of eerie happenings and creepy mystical... stuff.
In attempting to mount a mystical murder mystery, Mandala Murders creates larger unintentional ones like: “Who are these people?” and “who's that?” and “how are all these characters related to each other” and “why should I care?” and “what is even happening?” and “wait...what?” and “has solving murders ever felt this dull?”.
Despite having all the ingredients in place—of cops, killers, cold cases, investigations—writers Gabe Gabriel, Matt Graham, Gopi Puthran, Anurag Goswami, Avinash Dwivedi, and Chirag Garg struggle to establish a central arc to guide us through the tedious slogfest.
The show’s impressive ability to keep you utterly confused and unable to clearly follow the proceedings is also ironic given how much time is devoted to exposition dumps, lazy flashbacks and characters talking at us.
Things only really click into place four episodes in. It’s at this midpoint that Rea and Vikram finally team up, and the narrative is able to articulate what on earth is going on and why and find some sense of coherence. It’s why the latter half of the series fares (slightly) better. Not that it matters. I still couldn't explain to you why the killings take place or how the victims are connected.
Till then, enduring Mandala Murders feels like listening to an excited, out-of-breath child frantically trying to recount a crazy dream they had, as you try to keep up.
“Yeah so there’s umm murder, and umm legs are attached to his head and uhh the politicians frame these gangster and uhh Vikram’s wife is in a coma and there are these mysterious symbols they have to solve and Raghubir Yadav can speak to shadows and in 1952 these witches led by Shriya Pilgaonkar are trying to bring a dead body to life Frankenstein-style and somebody's face peels off and...”.
A Misplaced Vaani Kapoor
As supercop Rea, Vaani Kapoor seems to have brought a gun to a ghost fight. She has presence, but navigates through the series as an action hero in search of a new instalment of the Mardaani franchise, who took a wrong turn and is now stuck in a spooky thriller.
Elsewhere, it’s a largely wasted cast. It’s only the always delightful Jameel Khan who appears to be having a blast here as a hippie symbol decoder known as Jimmy Khan.
In the end, Mandala Murders is eight episodes of characters we barely know and feel for, doing things we don't understand, for agendas and motives that are poorly explained, building to revelations that barely make sense, peppered with twists that happen because they can. It doesn't even work on most basic levels of a violent, pulpy thriller along the lines of Asur, which appears to be a clear inspiration here.
At various points through the series, characters enter the creepy forest to meet the creepy priest with the creepy machine, to make a wish. “Vardaan maango” (make a wish), he says each time. “Coherence” is what I’d reply. There goes my thumb.
Mandala Murders released on Netflix on 25 July.
(Suchin Mehrotra is a critic and film journalist who covers Indian cinema for a range of publications. He's also the host of The Streaming Show podcast on his own YouTube channel. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)