‘Gyaarah Gyaarah’ series review: Middling crime thriller bids its time

Raghav Yugal in ‘Gyaarah Gyaarah’ 

Gyaarah Gyaarah, out on ZEE5 and adapted from the Korean series Signal, is a time-warping thriller of the dour, soulless kind. Tumbling across timelines, director Umesh Bist always makes sure to hold his audience’s hand. Bland letters appear on screen to indicate the precise date, year, location. Lest we lose our bearings, the pop-culture references are even more plain: Dil for 1990, Kapoor & Sons for 2016. This is a fairly unimaginative way to summon a period, to evoke a mood. It’s unlike the scene in Back to the Future where Doc in the 1950s exclaims to Marty, who’s traveled back from the 80s, “Ronald Reagan! The actor?! Then who’s vice president? Jerry Lewis?”

In Dehradun, the abduction and murder of a little girl has gone unsolved for years. Inspectors Vamika (Kritika Kamra) and Yug (Raghav Juyal) have a few days’ window to nab the culprit; if they fail, an incoming statute of limitations would render such unresolved cases closed. While working the case one night, Yug comes in possession of an old walkie-talkie that mysteriously buzzes to life. On the other end is Shaurya (Dhairya Karwa), a cop in 2001, investigating the same case. He says that Yug gave him a lead, and terms their conversations “transmissions”. Gradually, with a mix of surprise and trepidation, Yug realises they can work together.

Unfortunately, following this promising setup, the show steadily loses steam. The succession of cases that Yug and Shaurya collaborate on fails to engage beyond a point (Is that why they went unresolved in the first place? I wondered foolishly). Despite the frequent running around — and some efficient use of parallel editing in the pacier scenes — the narrative withers and sags. Bist’s rendering of the setting and characters lacks the lived-in quality he brought to his last feature, the tragicomedy Pagglait. Yug, despite his purported MA in Psychology, isn’t the most convincing of criminal profilers. “Psychotic people are self-obsessed. They won’t care for pets,” he declares at one point. Right. Tell that to the Nazis.

A still from ‘Gyaarah Gyaarah’

It likely won’t count as a criticism, given that a character candidly declares time to be an ‘illusion’, but Gyaarah Gyaarah feels dated as a streaming series. That it comes from Dharma and Sikhya, the twin forces behind the recent actioner Kill, is perhaps the bigger mystery to solve. Barring its central conceit — the seeds lie in the American sci-fi film Frequency, and Anurag Kashyap attempted something similar with Dobaaraa — the show has little else to recommend it, indistinguishable from countless thrillers that hunker down in hilltowns, with killers in hoodies and forensic experts who say, “This needs time…”

Kamra’s mettlesome performance is let down by a fidgety screenplay; the series has a tendency, not uncommon to web shows, of squandering resonance for quick dramatic gains. Both Juyal and Karwa make fine leads: the latter, playing an incorrigible hothead, exerts a commanding physical presence. My eyes, however, kept drifting over to a minor character on the edges of the frame. If nothing else, Gyaarah Gyaarah will endure as a sweet sendoff for Nitish Pandey. The Khosla Ka Ghosla actor passed away last year. Here, he plays Balwant, a samosa-guzzling cop who comes to love his job. Pandey was an unassuming everyman for every scene, always at the ready, staring on with owlish wonderment at the world around him. In a low-key way consistent with his characters, he will always be missed.

Gyaarah Gyaarah is streaming on ZEE5