Lights Off:
The sci-fi-paranormal horror series, Andhera, starts by introducing the idea that darkness is devouring the city, which is entirely believable. Then goes into a dizzying maze of subplots from which it is difficult to emerge unscathed.
A young woman, Bani (Jahnvi Rawat) goes missing, and the cops are in a rush to close the file, in spite of protests from her father (Jairoop Jeevan). A cop, Kalpana Kadam (Priya Bapat) starts looking carefully at the case, and finds that it was not properly investigated. Ignoring sexist remarks by her male colleagues, she starts working on it, and goes down a wormhole of the paranormal and a criminal conspiracy to control the world.
Two other people Jay (Karanvir Malhotra) and Jude (Kavin Dave) are mysteriously linked to Bani, and both believe a dark force is at work. Jay’s brother, Prithvi (Pranay Pachauri) is in a coma after a bizarre accident for which Jay blames himself.
Prithvi was conducting brain experiments for Dr Sahay (Parvin Dabas), who works for an evil (is there any other kind?) pharma company boss, Uberai (Dilip Shankar). Linked to the goings-on is a healing centre, Aatma, run by Ayesha (Surveen Chawla), a mysterious hitman Darius (Vatsal Sheth), Omar (Mohit Prajati), a kid with unusual brain activity.
Jay links up with Rumi (Prajakta Koli), who runs a vlog on paranormal activity, and has a bagful of gizmos to communicate with spirits. Jude is convinced that a comic book has the answer to the terror he is being subjected to, but with the last page missing, he cannot find a solution.
Kalpana, with bleak memories of her own, embarks on an affair with Ayesha, while running about with the Jay-Jude-Rumi, trio trying to make sense of the daily dose of mayhem thrown in her direction.
Created by Gaurav Desai and, and directed by Raaghav Dar, the eight-episode show (on Amazon Prime Video) has decent VFX (the production company is Excel) and the prosthetic make-up is undoubtedly spooky; it uses several familiar tropes from supernatural thrillers— brain control, evil twins, a dark force feeding on fear, guilt, misery and so on; however, while individual scenes work well, the show has to huff and puff to gather all the balls it throws into the air and fails to juggle expertly. Come to think of it, the collective despair of urban life would feed any monster, why does the plot pick on just a handful of characters?
So much effort and tech expertise are expended into the show, for it to end up boring. It is sporadically chilling—like Bani’s mother (Mandakini Goswami) is terrifying enough on her own— but the disparate elements take forever to come together, and then the climax falls into absurdity. When it comes to horror, audiences are willing to suspend disbelief, if the plot succeeds in being engaging.
The performances are what keep Andhera flowing–Priya Bapat, Prajakta Koli, Karanvir Malhotra and Surveen Chawla, (who must have played every shade of evil so far)— are earnest and work hard to dispel the sluggishness that keeps bogging down the show.
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)
