Controlled chaos is at the heart of Killer Soup. The eight-episode series takes betrayal, duplicity, revenge and murder and packs it into a deliciously dark comedy that engages from the first minute, plays out in ways both unpredictable and thrilling — with the two never being mutually exclusive of each other — builds to a crescendo and ultimately ties it all together neatly, with a ribbon on top, but leaves the door ajar, hopefully for least one more season.
Created and directed by Abhishek Chaubey — the maker of twisty tales like Ishqiya and Udta Punjab — Killer Soup is cooked up by a battery of writers that includes Chaubey, Unaiza Merchant, Harshad Nalawade and Anant Tripathi. The quartet reference everything from Nordic noir to Shakespeare, ’80s Bollywood kitsch to the black comedy genre to even Mani Ratnam, to whip up a story that, despite its allusions, remains delightfully original as well as deep-rooted desi.
Something is afoot in the fictional south Indian town of Mainjur. The uncouth Shetty brothers — a pair of gangsters masquerading as entrepreneurs — run a string of dubious businesses, which also includes drugs. Prabhakar Shetty (Manoj Bajpayee) has defrauded his older brother Arvind (Sayaji Shinde, with quite a Shool reunion happening here) of more just few a crores and is trying to sell him another business plan, but with little success. Prabhakar’s wife Swathi (Konkona Sensharma) dreams of opening her restaurant, though the paya soup she insists on whipping up for almost every meal is, politely put, inedible. Swathi’s plans, however, are subject to Arvind approving their business idea and sanctioning funds.
Illtreated by her husband for years and made to feel almost invisible by her brother-in-law, Swathi is having an affair with her husband’s masseur Umesh (also played by Manoj Bajpayee). The other key players in this quagmire include an indomitable cop (Hassan, played by Nassar), Arvind’s daughter Appu (Anula Navlekar) and their loyal man Friday Lucas (Lal).
What starts as a tale of ambition and double-dealing quickly escalates into a series of murders. Swathi, in a Machiavellian mould inspired by Lady Macbeth, is the chief orchestrator, her hands bloodied even in circumstances where she may not have pulled the trigger herself. Swathi’s shenanigans — Konkona’s eyes and sardonic smile are enough to elevate the character several notches above what it must have been on paper — are what propel Killer Soup forward, but none of the other characters are strictly black or white.
Tinged with elements of satire and delightfully absurd in its DNA, Killer Soup, streaming on Netflix, is a hugely enjoyable watch. There is never a dull moment. Imbued with taut tension but not failing to tease a chuckle out of you, the series — with its central idea culled from a newspaper headline — always feels authentic. That is, of course, on account of its backdrop with the generally unexplored-on-screen atmospherics of the southern part of the country richly contributing to both scene and setting. The dialogue is a mix of Hindi, Tamil and English, with characters switching from one to another with seamless ease.
As the plots and subplots — propped up by everything from the sublime to the ridiculous — get dense, festered secrets, unhinged ambition, tottering loyalties and ultimately the big switcheroo provide a fertile playground for Chaubey and his co-writers to play around with a series that brings both the wild and the wicked in insane, but carefully balanced, measure.
There are numerous Easter eggs strewn in the narrative. There is a hint of Hamlet’s Ghost in the dead junior cop (Anbuthasan is a rage in the role) popping up to ‘help’ piece together the case and the unruly, comedic energy is symbolic of everything from Charlie Chaplin to the climax of Priyadarshan’s comedies. There is also a direct hat-tip to Mani Ratnam with Tu hi re, the song of love and longing from the auteur’s Bombay, appearing almost as a crucial plot point, and a central character adopting the alias of Manisha Koirala. Nassar, who is one of the major reasons for you to give Killer Soup a watch, was, of course, in Bombay. Nina Simone’s Sinnerman, which can possibly describe almost every character in Killer Soup, plays out at a point.
One Manoj Bajpayee is enough to shoulder any project and in Killer Soup, we have two. The man, who is at the top of his game, makes Prabhakar and Umesh starkly different, all the while bringing in shades of his familiar deadpan humour and even a touch of humanity. Sayaji Shinde is enjoyably unhinged, Kani Kusruti’s Kalaripayattu skills in both dance and action are a treat, with Lal functioning as a strong pillar in this dream ensemble cast. A special word for Anula Navlekar as Appu who we want to watch more of.
Ultimately, Killer Soup belongs to Konkona Sensharma. The actor throws a curveball, excelling in playing both conniving witch and tragic jester. With Swathi, Konkona shows us (yet again) what a superlative performer she is, no matter what the genre or role, and she and Manoj Bajpayee, cast together for the first time, pull off the delicate dance between comedy and tragedy, the absurd and the pragmatic in ways that very few others, if at all, can.
Priyanka Roy I liked/ didn’t like Killer Soup because... Tell t2@abp.in
