266. Web-series Reviews – 104

More web-series reviews…

Fauda (Season 4) – Came out in 2023.  The action in this season shifts to Brussels when Gabi travels there to see Omar, one of his agents who has infiltrated Hezbollah. Doron travels with him as his personal bodyguard, but when Gabi runs into Omar, things flip around and he is kidnapped and transported somewhere secret. It is now up to the Belgian and Israeli forces to locate the hiding area where Gabi is being held captive. Running parallel to this story is the tale of Maya, a decorated Israeli Police Officer who is now being investigated on account of Omar being his brother.

One of the reviews from Times of India...

The stakes are much higher, and the canvas is much bigger in season four of “Fauda.” The thriller series is able to hit the mark once more with an intriguing plot and multiple twists. Despite being a long season (12 episodes), “Fauda” is a compelling watch and has all the qualities to keep you captivated. The television show never lets up, and each episode leaves you eager to watch the next one. It has an intriguing plot with the right amount of emotion carried in it amid the action. The fact that this series has stuck to its main premise is its best quality. The plot has only advanced in the ways that were promised and demonstrated in season one.

The first episode of this series features an armed heist where the booty would fund terrorism. The Israeli Defense Force learns of a larger, more nefarious scheme when one of them is apprehended. Omar, one of the operatives that Gabi hired and who has now infiltrated Hezbollah, is now afraid for his life. Gabi reassures him and makes a commitment to come see him soon in Brussels to allay all of his concerns. In order to uphold protocols, Gabi names Doron as his bodyguard and leaves for Brussels. Omar kidnaps Gabi at the meeting site, and he is taken hostage and to an unidentified destination. Eli, Nurit, Sagi, and Steve all join Doron in Brussels to save Gabi in the meantime. Running parallel to this is the tale of Maya, a decorated police officer of the Israeli Police. When it is revealed that Omar is Maya's brother and that she has been communicating with him covertly, she is suspended from the police department.

Since someone very close to the Defence Force members is involved in the events of Fauda season 4, thus when Gabi is taken captive by Hezbollah, all hell actually breaks loose. Doron is greatly affected by the incident, and all of his weaknesses are exposed. When he meets Dana, he is agitated and blunt in his speech. The event has an impact on Steve, Eli, Nurit, and Sagi, and they are desperate to find him at any cost. Doron's portrayal in the series, both personally and professionally, is fascinating to watch. The creators have done a great job of capturing emotions and human frailties while maintaining the appropriate level of tension. In the series, we see Doron emerge from his forced retirement to take on a recognized enemy.

The show's creators, Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff are clearly in complete control of the plot even in its fourth season, and they have only become more ambitious. For precisely this reason, the mission that is shown in the current season is also the most ambitious one. Fauda's success can also be ascribed to the fact that the action never stops, and something interesting always seems to be happening. This only keeps viewers interested. Another ace for the series is that even if you have missed earlier seasons of “Fauda,” it won't stop you from enjoying the current season. This time, the Israeli Defense Force confronts Hezbollah head-on and does it in a methodical manner. Although they are entirely different shows, there are similarities between the broader plot of this “Fauda” and “Homeland.”

Once more operating at full speed, Lior Raz is excellent as Doron. One gets to witness sincere performances from other actors too, but Amir Boutros as Omar and Lucy Ayoub as Maya stand out as two of the season's most memorable characters. They both play key roles in the story and fully embody their roles. “Fauda" is a tense series where you may keep yourself entertained with action, office humour, evil schemes, and terrorist organizations. It’s a series where nothing is real but you somehow tend to believe it. “Fauda” was and still is an entertaining ride.

My Take – Don't miss it! In fact don’t miss watching the entire series😊!!

 

Story of Things – Came out on 2023.  Human emotions like greed, fear, anger, loneliness, love and guilt can have a tremendous effect on one's life. This anthology series of five stories explores these emotions, blurring the lines between the real and the surreal.

One of the reviews from The Hindu...

An ingenious supernatural anthology that makes you want more.  Using the theme and format to its advantage, George K Antoney’s supernatural anthology effectively tells five stories about the unnerving possibilities that can arise when ordinary objects behave unusually.

Everything interesting about the supernatural rests beyond the carnate world. And we have seen horror titles where, like the tangible human body, inanimate materials are used as mediums for the supernatural. In 2009, we got two films, Eeram and Yaavarum Nalam, that banked on this idea. The latter even had a mobile phone get hijacked by a spirit as the medium to the human world, and so did 2020’s Andhaghaaram.

Storyline: An anthology of five stories that follow characters who experience supernatural occurrences through material objects around them

Similar is the case with Sony LIV’s latest anthology series Story of Things, in which writer-director George K Antoney gives life to inanimate objects in different forms to tell five distinct stories. Even here, we see a mobile phone become a supernatural portal. However, Story of Things is unlike anything we have seen before, and here, the material things take the foreground and are used as more than just gimmicks. Apart from horror, other sub-genres of speculative fiction are also touched upon. The core idea and the format are used to their advantage, and George taps into the peculiar situations that can arise when ordinary objects behave unusually. This is primarily what the series aims to do — it isn’t a typical horror series meant to scare you with gore/ jump scares or darkness — and it’s fascinating how each of these stories explores specific emotions.

For instance, in Weighing Scale, an ordinary story gets elevated into something ambiguously unnatural as it explores guilt and penance. When Ram (Bharath) and Titus (Linga), aspiring actors, are close to grabbing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a moment of carelessness endangers the life of a stranger. Titus, ridden with guilt, urges Ram to surrender to the police, but Ram refuses to let go of the aspirational life he craves. Things take an eerie turn when the latter is haunted by a weighing device he finds in his late grandmother’s belongings that weighs his sins in addition to his body weight.

Weighing Scale is the first of the five stories, and it sets up the mood of the rest of the series quite well. In Compressor, the stakes are pushed a little further through an air conditioning unit that refuses to switch off. When Raghu (Roju) chances upon a bundle of cash, he asks his live-in girlfriend Shruthi (Ritika Singh) to either plan a vacation for the two, or buy an air conditioner. She buys a second-hand AC, and the object begins to trouble Raghu. When he goes missing all of a sudden, Shruthi begins to investigate.

Compressor, however, is the weakest of the five stories in terms of depth and innovation. Car and Cellular, on the other hand, are more classical in their approach to the genre. In Cellular, a regular story of our times about a controlling mother (Gautami) and a daughter wanting to break free, gets a horror twist unexpectedly. Having been raised in the shadow of her mother, Vannamayil (Aditi Balan) decides to do as she likes for once, and the unfortunate happens. But Vannamayil gets the scare of her life when she gets an otherworldly call.

Meanwhile, Car has Britto (Shantanu Bhagyaraj) on a brave quest to overcome the fear of his abusive father (Siddique) and his car. Every time his mother questioned his father for beating him, little Britto would get locked up by his father in his car with a watchdog standing guard. Inside that dark and dingy car, Britto’s fears manifest in many forms. Decades later, Britto decides to fight back, but the ghosts of his past return.

Both these stories delve into the psyches of the protagonists and have them deal with the trauma that the relationship with a parent brings in. In Vannamayil’s case, it is the dependency she has on her mother and the guilt of wanting freedom that punishes her. Even though he has chosen to overcome his phobia and deal with his past, Britto’s journey has layers of pain, and he has to deal with the very foundation of who he grew up as. Material things, apart from becoming mediums for the paranormal, also become metaphors in these stories.

George saves his best for the last, and we get a beautiful story of how a little girl becomes the friend-in-need for a heartbroken college-goer. After he is thrown out of his hostel, Sethu (Vinoth Kishan), who is suffering a terrible break-up, moves into the attic of an old house. He questions his own sanity for a moment when a ten-year-old girl named Nazia talks to him through an old dresser mirror. Mirror, the final episode in the series, is hopeful and heartwarming; it’s also interesting how George retains a lot of ambiguity and only lets the emotions speak.

It’s impressive how the storytelling form remains consistent throughout the series and the overall theme anchors them all. It’s also lovely to see filmmakers use the silence and background score well; the music, scored by Madley Blues (Harish Venkat and Prashanth Techno), and the sound design complement the writing too.

Story of Things is one of those rare titles that makes you want more. The very concept does half its job, and one can think of a host of possibilities that can come out of it.

My Take –  Worth a watch!

 

The Trial by Fire – Came out in 2023.  Difficult yet resilient journey of two parents - Neelam and Shekhar Krishnamoorthy, trying to seek justice over the last two decades. The Uphaar cinema fire tragedy.

One of the reviews from Variety...

On the afternoon of June 13, 1997, a fire caused by an improperly maintained transformer broke out in Delhi’s Uphaar Cinema, quietly fumigating an auditorium packed for a first-day screening of flagwaving blockbuster “Border” with carbon monoxide before plunging the room into darkness.

Those scrambling for the exits found multiple code violations standing between them and survival; the balcony doors had been padlocked from the outside to prevent late entry. 59 cinemagoers never saw the light again; over 100 were injured.

“It wasn’t a cinema hall, it was a crematorium,” notes one official in “Trial by Fire,” a necessarily sorrowful but forcefully compelling seven-part dramatization of the blaze and its aftermath, which represents one of Netflix India’s strongest miniseries to date.

At its centre are Neelam and Shekhar Krishnamoorthy (Rajshri Deshpande and Abhay Deol), a representative middle-class couple who are introduced as they wave their son Ujjwal (Abhishek Sharrma) and daughter Unnati (Poorti Jai Agarwal) off to what would ordinarily have been just another matinee. Of the two, it’s Neelam who reacts more violently to news of her children’s deaths, absconding from the funeral to conduct a one-woman investigation into the tragedy.

This quest for justice leads her — and the show — to the gilded doors of the Uphaar’s owners, Gopal and Sushil Ansal, at that point Asia’s biggest property developers, who subsequently spent years deferring any responsibility onto the electricity board and fire services. (The brothers returned to the courts last week, seeking unsuccessfully to halt the show’s release.)

Justice of any kind would be a long time coming; the inferno was the prelude to several agonizing cycles of legal hell. Yet in adapting the real-life Krishnamoorthys’ 2016 memoir, showrunner Prashant Nair and co-writer Kevin Luperchio grant themselves room to manoeuvre: notice of kinetic intent is served by an early pursuit that dispatches Shekhar after an apparently unmoored Neelam. Later instalments highlight the pair’s frustration that the news cycle has abandoned them, and the effort to assemble survivors’ support network AVUT (The Association of Victims of Uphaar Fire Tragedy). Yet suggestive nudging, marked changes of pace and multiple perspective switches succeed in moving the series along, as do brisk, digestible 40-minute episodes: judicious briefing, not dutiful procedural, is the order of the day.

One through line is the portrait of a marriage tested not just by the tragedy, but by the sudden emptiness of the household to which husband and wife returned. Deol’s Shekhar remains trusty and rational behind his surveyor’s spectacles, running a sensible campaign until he’s led astray by an old friend in an episode that suggests at least one half of the couple may themselves be moving on. Neelam is both more focused and more volatile, her residual anger lending an edge even to generic tête-à-têtes. That rage proved sustaining and transformative – it changed the way India gathered going into the 21st century – but for the most part, Deshpande works expressive miracles with a limited palette of scowls and frowns. Her Neelam can’t shake off an inner sadness; we wonder whether we will ever see her smile again.

Yet the true dramatic achievement lies in the way the series expands around the couple; in so doing, “Trial by Fire” becomes vastly more kaleidoscopic than the linear procedural form typically allows. Nair and Luperchio dig out involving subplots for the Ansals’ enforcer Neeraj (Ashish Vidyarthi) and repairman Veer Singh (Rajesh Tailang), while a haunting, deftly acted sidebar centred on a retired Army couple (Anupam Kher and Ratna Pathak Shah) allows the show to re-examine both the veracity of the film people were literally dying to see, and what India was prepared to stand and fight for circa 1997.

This tragedy had multiple layers and levels, which is one reason “Trial” cuts deep: it’s not just the Krishnamoorthys’ struggle, but the struggle of a country gripped by a widespread dysfunction in how it does business.

A quarter-century on, India has embraced streaming TV wholesale — sometimes haphazardly, with a deluge of projects rushed into production, squandering ideas as they go. “Trial by Fire” feels more considered, marked by a new maturity in writing, direction, performance and craft, and a determination to get its story right, the better to uphold the justice for which the Krishnamoorthys and AVUT fought.

By the closer — a grim, sooty final reckoning with the events of June 13 — the colourful escapism of the Uphaar’s Bollywood posters suddenly looks half a world away. As the Ansals surely realized, this “Trial” sides with those of us in the cheap seats. Yet it does so out of solidarity, and a recognition — one the judiciary was painfully reluctant to share — that we have as much to lose as any tycoon when the lights go down.

My Take – Worth a watch!

Cheers till next time😊!!