Perhaps the makers of Karmma Calling took the English proverb ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’ a bit too seriously. The seven-part revenge drama series streaming on Disney + Hotstar is exactly that — cold and bland. Even with a gorgeous Raveena Tandon at the forefront, this Indian adaptation of the US drama series Revenge lacks the spark it promised in the promotions.
Karmma Calling portrays the lives of Mumbai’s wealthy and elite with plush homes in the coastal town of Alibaug. The story revolves around a young woman, Karma Talwar, who has taken on an alias and is plotting revenge against her dead father’s former boss Kaushal Kothari, an influential businessman, and his wife Indrani, unbeknown to them.
Raveena brings the glamour quotient as the actress-turned-socialite Indrani, known as the ‘queen of Alibaug’, who along with her husband has many secrets to hide. Karma works her charm on Kaushal and Indrani’s foreign-returned son Ahaan Kothari in order to make inroads into their lives.
Though the premise is set for an exciting game of guile, hoodwinking, suspicion and treachery, the show directed by Ruchi Narain, falls flat on most counts. The twists are not thrilling enough and the solutions are too pat. The dialogue delivery is stilted and there’s too much melodrama over the mix of family secrets, business dynamics and extramarital affairs.
The presentation of the high-end lifestyle of the elite doesn’t quite land either, like the sequence on Indrani hopping on to a private helicopter with her husband and friends to go see the moon on a cloudy Karva Chauth night.
The love triangle subplot involving Karma, her fiancee Ahaan and her childhood best friend Vedant is yet to have enough emotional heft for the viewer to root for Karma and Vedant (a second season is definitely in the pipeline with the murder of a key character remaining unsolved).
After making her OTT debut with Aranyak on Netflix in 2021, Raveena smoothly slipped into the high heels of Indrani Kothari but her acting talents have largely gone unutilised in this show. And yet, Raveena stands out from the rest of the cast. Gaurav Sharma is convincing as Indrani’s deceitful husband, but Namrata Sheth has a long way to go as the show’s title character, Karma.
