A dark comedy adorned with murder and mayhem, served with a side order of “paya” soup and a dream platter of Manoj Bajpayee and Konkona Sensharma? When I learned about Abhishek Chaubey’s upcoming web series, “Killer Soup,” for 2024, I thought, “Sign me up already.” It pains me to say it, but this mixture, which held out so much promise in terms of aroma and freshness, only partially materialised for me.
The positive effects come first. The charming Mainjur, a little village near Madurai, serves as the ideal backdrop for a twisting story full of sketchy characters and sketchier deeds. Husband and wife team Prabhakar or Prabhu Shetty (Manoj Bajpayee) and Swathi (Konkona Sensharma) are having what seems like an endless dispute; she is dreaming of opening her own restaurant, while he is attempting to figure out how to get out of a multi-crore “ghapla.” The foul-mouthed, streetwise Arvind Shetty (Saiyaji Shinde), Prabhu’s older brother, is unhelpful; he keeps the family’s purse strings tight and his art-loving daughter Apeksha, called Apu (Anula Navelkar), even tighter, forbidding her from pursuing her dreams. The gravelly-voiced Lucas (Lal), Arvind’s longtime factotum, is a custodian of old secrets and knows where the bones are buried.
There seems to be a lot of potential for a fly in the soup. Or several. A happy private investigator pulls out a camera and takes embarrassing pictures. There’s a hint of blackmail. Manoj Bajpayee plays Prabhu’s duplicate, Umesh Pillai, a squint-eyed masseuse who appears at the wrong location and at the wrong time. The bodies begin to pile up. When beady-eyed senior Inspector Hassan (Nasser), burly cop Asha (Shilpa Mudbi), and enthusiastic rookie Thupalli (Anbuthasan) show up, they stir things up. Who is that enigmatic burkha-wearing woman? Where is the missing camera? Whose remains are in that cemetery where the fireflies are swarming?
Although that may sound like a lot, these plot points—which are ostensibly based on a real-life case—dissipate over the course of eight 45–50 minute episodes in writing that is primarily straightforward and sporadically complex. Quirk is great when it is intrinsic to the characters and embellishes the story-telling, but here it feels grafted on. Watching this, I flash-backed to the delightful quirky touches in Chaubey’s ‘Ishqiya’ and ‘Dedh Ishqiya’: were there too many cooks here?
The whole idea of a black ‘comedy’ is that it is meant to be funny, and that it makes you chortle, despite yourself, but here I kept waiting for the laughs. I also kept waiting for shockers, also an essential black comedy component, but the proceedings bob along placidly. Where’s the urgency? Or the tension? Why is the Hyderabadi ‘khansama’ such an exaggerated note? Why, in fact, this obsession with badly-made ‘paya’ soup? We never really find out. And why, most crucially, don’t the uber-talented Bajpayee and Sensharma spark together? By rights, they should have set the screen ablaze.
Certain details do matter, particularly when fresh faces appear. It’s a great touch that so many of the characters speak Tamil as they would naturally. When Kirtima (Kani Kusruti, extremely good) arrived to claim her pound of flesh, which weakened when confronted by her low-backed blouses, I also sat up. For example, there is a startling note that lingers too long when the strong-willed Apu, portrayed by a convincing Navlekar, lashes out at her abusive father who is unable to talk without hurting his moms and sisters. Shinde and Bajpayee collaborated more successfully in the 1999 police drama “Shool.”
Just by being there, the most fantastic Nasser kept pulling me back into the thick of everything. His old-timey cop who won’t stop, who knows when to use a slap, and how to meet a plank just right, measuring his length on the floor, is a delight. He is droll and sharp, as required, and the best part of this bland broth.
