Killer Soup (2024) Web Series Review: The Abhishek Chaubey-directed Netflix series opens with a semblance of normality and order. We are invited into the Shetty household in the fictional hill town of Mainjur. Things look all rosy and perfectly fine, but only fleetingly. For a show that essentially circles charade and performance, the cracks in the façade are quickly and brutally exposed. As Prabhakar ‘Prabhu’ (Manoj Bajpayee) discovers his wife Swathi’s (Konkona Sen Sharma) affair with his masseuse, Umesh, incidentally his lookalike with a squint eye, all hell breaks loose.
This is but just one set of deceptions and manipulations that play out between the couple. Swathi dreams of having her own restaurant, which Prabhu has been promising her for years but kept deferring. Little does she know his own secrets, his affair with his resort manager, Kirtima (a stellar Kani Kusruti), a botched business deal with his brother, Aravind (Sayaji Shinde, rollicking as the foulmouthed corrupt entrepreneur), and imminent bankruptcy. It’s a bustling, enormously busy tale, spilling over with a gallery of supporting characters; the tone takes sudden swerves, which works only sparingly. While Chaubey cannily orchestrates the many swift bends and turns in the narrative, the show’s writing leans too heavily into the element of surprise.
The screenplay, co-written by Unaiza Merchant, Anant Tripathi, and Harshad Nalawade, strikes as especially determined to unsettle things just when they seem to be slowing down and falling in place. It is resistant to letting its characters get along with each other, thrusting them into a series of misadventures that spiral out of their control. Interestingly, none of the string of deaths in the show is purportedly intended by the person(s) they are attributed to. The murder(ess) insists those are accidental casualties and admittedly there’s great pleasure in watching Sen Sharma go through the motions of bewilderment and horror at her actions and their domino effect.
Swathi is consistently thwarted by the men around her, but she doesn’t allow any of it to bog her down. She furiously and energetically hatches schemes and cover-ups, resolutely convinced of her impeccable intentions. It is a tremendous role, and Sen Sharma plays it lightly, gliding through each hurdle cast Swathi’s way. The actress fascinatingly renders the moral slipperiness of her character as merely incidental to what she desires to accomplish, no matter if it implies uprooting those who intervene in her way.
However, the writing lacks the requisite wit and sharpness to sustain a surfeit of eight overlong episodes that push frantic plotting past the point when the characters could register in individual, specific strokes. There’s constantly too much stuff happening or the coiled-up trepidation of forthcoming disasters, yet the narrative bulwark is tied down to tedium that creeps up on the viewer. To siphon drama from the rapidly swelling sense of bizarreness, the show needed a tighter grip and a smarter insight into when it should have reined in any of the many quirky tricks up its sleeve. An easy example would be Inspector Hassan’s (Nassar) guilt-spurred hallucinations about his ill-fated subordinate, Thupalli (Anbuthasan).
This whole strand of a drenched ghost whose poetry-suffused clues guide the inspector down the trail of investigation is overstretched and strains dramatic interest. After it pops up too frequently and oftentimes makes it too convenient for the inspector to take the correct path of action, the ghost track turns several shades silly. There are a slew of oddities that stick out as sore loose ends instead of organically fusing into the wilfully bonkers narrative. Swathi’s cooking teacher gives off a hag-like air that strikes as too designed to pique interest, but like several other minor players, ranging from a female cop to a salon owner, the character blurs away.
“Killer Soup” perpetually aims for an off-kilter energy but most of it comes off as mild and mind-bogglingly uninvolving. Thrills are leached off even as the body count rises and accidents accumulate, arguably populating the show with a way bigger, sloppier mess than it can conceivably handle. The constructed-ness of performing skids off the command of the narrative as it starts to bumble along instead of sprucing up a vested interest in the hastily rolling events. The trade-off of secrets blackmails, and machinations to fob off others becomes hectic and overcooked. Mercifully, it is Anuj Rakesh Dhawan’s camerawork that lends personality and distinctiveness to the visual palette of the town, but the series ultimately resembles a stew that continually drains your appetite rather than potentially enticing it.
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