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Based on the 2016 Korean web series ‘Signal’, ‘Gyaarah Gyaarah’ gives us an Uttarakhand-based police procedural featuring characters overlapping in parallel storylines about unsolved murders unspooling over two eras, connected through a supernatural boost.
In a Dusshera mela in Dehradun, a young girl goes missing. Her distraught mother (Gautami Kapoor) never lets the local police forget: fifteen years later, there are no signs of her husband — who behaved like a fumbling extra, unsure of how he needs to act — and she is still waiting to understand exactly what happened that fateful night. But with no leads in sight, the case has long since gone cold.
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In the best traditions of the genre, a fresh infusion of blood is required in order to blow off dust. The stasis which has senior cop Vamika Rawat (Kritika Kamra) and her reluctant older colleagues in its grip is broken by newbie psychological profiler Yug Arya (Raghav Juyal), who is left gobsmacked when a funnel opens up between him and an investigative cop Shaurya Anthwal (Dhairya Karwa), clearly operating in the past.
Err what? Yeah, exactly. An antique instrument crackles to life at exactly 11.11, becoming the conduit for an exchange of crucial information, and sets things in motion. Skeletons come tumbling out. The forensic team is given additional ammo, and the long-awaited breakthrough occurs. As it does in other baffling mouldering cases the ‘cold case’ team takes up: ding dong, it is gyaarah gyaarah.
The original, a middling 16 part show, is condensed into eight episodes in the ‘desi’ adaptation (directed by Umesh Bist and written by Sunjoy Shekhar and Puja Banerji), but it doesn’t quite lead to the brisk pace which a series like this should aim for. Which makes the whole thing a stretch. The plot-line cannot help becoming convoluted in the way it keeps zig-zagging through past and present, and some characters stay single note even after we come upon them fifteen years later, remarkably untouched by time — no wrinkles, grey hair, or bulky midriffs.
The performances are all serviceable, but you wish these characters were given more leeway through smarter writing. Kamra is at her best in the scenes she shares with an elderly time-keeper (Purnendu Bhattacharya), when she doesn’t have to bark instructions or orders at her subordinates, who seem to be at loggerheads for no good reason.
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Both Juyal, just coming off an explosive turn in Kill, and Karwa, who left an impact in 83, do their jobs well enough. You wonder why the writers thought it fit not to give poor Harsh Chhaya even a single line without an expletive. The late Nitesh Pandya, a wonderful actor, gets even shorter shrift: in the first episode, large hints are dropped that he is on the take, which angle is never explored in subsequent episodes. Poof, gone.
The biggest problem the series has is being unable to conjure up enough fear or menace, give or take a sequence or two. While we do get a sense of the outside — bus-stops from where a serial killer gets on, water bodies where the dead give up their secrets, aerial shots of the hills — a lot of this show never shakes off the feeling that it was constructed on sets. There’s also the problem of the wailing-violin background music which belongs strictly to mouldy movies. It has no space in web series meant to get past old practices. When will this tiresome melodrama be deep-sixed?
Gyaarah Gyaarah
Gyaarah Gyaarah director: Umesh Bist
Gyaarah Gyaarah cast: Kritika Kamra, Raghav Juyal, Dhairya Karwa, Harsh Chhaya, Gautami Kapoor, Nitesh Pandey, Purnendu Bhattacharya Gyaarah Gyaarah rating: 2 stars
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