We will never know the human cost of Chernobyl,” reads a line somewhere towards the end of the five-part series that dramatises the nuclear disaster that took place in Chernobyl in Soviet-Ukraine in 1986, but whose ripple effect — physical, emotional, moral, metaphorical — can be felt more than three decades later.

Chernobyl is a slow-burn web series that pulls no punches in presenting a scenario that’s both horrific and intriguing. It’s a bleak watch, but one that’s totally essential, especially in a world where empathy is at an all-time low, responsibility is constantly shifted from shoulder to shoulder and humanity has a continuing capacity to ruin itself.

Even as it unravels the how and why, the aftermath and the implications of a disaster that annihilated thousands and affected generations after, Chernobyl, that’s filmed as a docu-drama, hits home with its human story, its imagery — stark, haunting, stomach churning — staying on with you long after you have watched it.

Written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, Chernobyl has been variously hailed as “paradigm-shifting historical storytelling” and “a real-life disaster series that you can’t tear yourself away from”. It has a 9.7/10 rating on IMDb and a 95 per cent approval rating on rottentomatoes.com. But the impact and importance of Chernobyl is far beyond these numbers. The show has not only reignited debate about a decades-old disaster but also illustrates the far-reaching effects of human failure, political gameplay and all-round apathy.

Chernobyl, currently streaming on Hotstar, starts off with one of the most powerful five minutes you would have watched on screens big or small in recent times. In the spring of 1988, a man records a series of tapes indicting the engineer-in-charge of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant for the catastrophe and then hangs himself, the camera focusing on his dangling legs even as his pet cat looks up silently. It is a horrifying image, but what follows is even more bone chilling.

The narrative rewinds exactly two years ago to April 1986 when Chernobyl blew up without warning and the happenings of that terrible night unfold through multiple perspectives. There is pregnant Lyudmilla (Jessie Buckley) who witnesses the explosion from her window, sees her fireman husband Vasily (Adam Nagaitis) rush out in the middle of the night as one of the first responders and then die a slow and painful death because of exposure to radiation, his skin peeling off and his insides slowly giving way. There are the scientists and engineers from within the power plant who try and make sense of the enormity of what happened, some of them horrified beyond measure and some, like assistant chief engineer Dyatlov (Paul Ritter) who pulls out all the stops to cover up the human failure. And then there are the politicians in Moscow’s power corridors who indulge in a blame game and do all they can to prevent the world from discovering the extent of the devastation.

Even as residents of the neighbouring town of Pripyat watch the fire rage on from days from a vantage point on a bridge and bureaucrats keep insisting that things are not as bad as they look, it’s Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), the deputy director of the Moscow-based Kurchatov Institute (and the man who eventually hangs himself), who is brought in to aid clean-up efforts by then general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Legasov, who is the only one aware of the implications of the disaster, has minister Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard) for company and the interactions between the two — they gradually warm to each other despite being on opposite sides of the debate initially — is what gives Chernobyl much of its narrative heft.

Giving the show its emotional touch is Lyudmilla — a scene where she refuses to leave her husband’s side even when she no longer recognises him is heart wrenching (“He is no longer your husband. He’s dangerous to you”, she’s told) — and Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson),

a nuclear physicist who’s one of the first few to fully grasp the magnitude of what’s happened and bends backwards to convince those in power that emergency measures need to be taken. In one of the show’s most telling scenes that encapsulates both ignorance and apathy, Khomyuk has a heated exchange with a hard-nosed bureaucrat (“I’m telling you there is no problem,” he tells her. “I’m telling you there is,” she insists. His response: “I prefer my opinion to yours.”)

Chernobyl is not an easy watch, and that’s not only on account of the physical horror brought on by the catastrophe. In Episode 4, we meet a civilian called Pavel (Barry Keough) who is tasked with taking down animals affected by the radiation. “You put a bullet in someone and you are no longer you any more,” he’s told and you feel both his horror and helplessness.

A sense of creeping dread pervades Chernobyl and the show does take some time to get going. Things kick into top gear in Episode 3 and from then on, the show becomes a heady ride, culminating in a trial in a court of law that sees the perpetrators being let off lightly. Even as it attempts to portray some scenes as dispassionately as possible, every bit of Chernobyl strikes an emotional chord in its audience

(“I am asking your permission to kill them”, is one of the most horrifying lines you would have heard in a long time), and that’s its biggest victory. The show is completely filmed in dark hues and sepia tones and that contributes to the bleakness of the narrative.

Chernobyl ends with some scary statistics, including a figure of a possible 93,000 immediate deaths — and many more through the later years — as a result of seven tons of nuclear fuel being let loose into the atmosphere. We are shown shots of the clothes of the first responders — all dead — lying in the basement of the plant, radioactive even to this day. The effects of the catastrophe may no longer be as potent, but the horror of it can never be wiped out.