Aranyak
Cast: Raveena Tandon (Kasturi Dogra), Parambrata Chatterjee (Angad Malik), Ashutosh Rana (Mahadev Dogra), Zakir Hussain (Kuber Manhas), Indraneil Sengupta (Ravi Parashar), Meghna Malik (Jagdamba Dhumal)
Created By: Charudutt Acharya, Rohan Sippy
Directed By: Vinay Waikul
Producer: Siddharth Roy kapoor, Ramesh Sippy, Rohan Sippy
Production: Ramesh Sippy Entertainment, Roy Kapur Films
Cinematography: Saurabh Goswami
Platform: Netflix
Release Date: 10th Dec 2021
Rating: 3.8/5
Aranyak is a tale of mystery, intrigue and murder with a touch of supernatural on the side. Aranyak does not try to outdo itself with a convoluted plotline but it does buildup slowly. Set in Sironah,a fictional town modeled after Indian hill stations, the scenes are picturesque with winding mountain roads, lush green trees and tall forests. The place holds secrets and has several folklore associated with it. We are introduced to a mythical being called Nartendua, (half Leopard and half man), who has haunted the forests of Sironah…
Raveena’s character; Inspector Kasturi Dogra is crude, ambitious and a local feminist. Her contemporary, city bred Angad Malik on the other hand operates with method. For Dogra, the case of the leopard man (nartendua) is the case of a lifetime. In her words, it’s the one case that every police officer spend their entire lifetime honing their skills for, the one that earns them their fame and respect. However, it arrives right when she decides to take a 1 year hiatus, to work on her family life: her marriage with her low self-esteemed husband Harish and providing moral support to her studious and brilliant daughter Nutan for her board exams.
Though contrasts, Dogra provides familiarity where Angad provides Maturity. Angads efficient , methodical and quick management of the case, rubs salt on Dogras ego, who initially oscillates between running the family at home and solving the case. She fitfully spends some evenings, droning on about sticking to her familial commitments, before receiving a subtle nudge by her daughter to pursue her calling. Angad and Kasturi develop respect and trust for each other when they begin to see eye to eye on several issues. Both have troubled marriages as we discover early on and the story even manages to bring in a personal angle to the case.
Needless to say, the two work out their differences and it’s not long before they start working in tandem.
The town has its own boogey man called nartendua (leopard man) who seems to have made a reappearance after a span of 20 yrs with the case of Aimee Baptiste. Aimee, the daughter of a foreign tourist gets brutally raped, murdered and hung. She has gouge marks on her neck as if she were clawed by an animal. Very similar to the highly sensational cases of the leopardman from 20 yrs ago; where several women were killed in a similar fashion. Mahadeo Dogra, retired SP and father in law of Dogra is the only one who has ever come close to catching him and their solo encounter left an unguiculate marking on him. Though slow and incoherent with the years catching up to him, he displays an intuitive understanding of the killer’s psyche, the events and people that are involved.
In a small town like Sironah, politics does reign supreme. We have Kuber Manhas, patriarch of the local royal family, who along with his son-in-law works towards setting up a resort on forest land by hook or by crook. Jagdamba Dhumal, the local MP, who after her husband’s death took on the political reins and is credited with making Sironah more financially progressive.
With 8 episodes of 1 hr each, Aranyak is lengthy but it packs in not only murder and mystery but also love, marital issues, family traumas, revenge, a psycho, a kidnapping, political drama, teenague issues, suspense and drug deals. The stories are interspersed with each other. To hide one crime, another crime gets done, each party with their own secrets to hide. The stories loop into each other to form a full circle and in the end the crime takes a magnitude of its own.
What Angad does not expect is to find his life’s story to be interspersed with Sironahs goings on. What was supposed to be a closure turns out to be a fresh bag of worms. We follow lots of back stories and not every mystery is solved, which brings in the high probability of a season 2. The magical mushrooms remain elusive throughout the series. In the end, the forests of Sironah still hold many secrets.
And no one’s innocent.
