Curry and Cyanide movie review: Netflix’s dissatisfying true crime documentary inelegantly exhumes Jolly Joseph serial killings case

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Nobody in the family initially suspected any foul play; the in-laws were elderly, so no autopsies were conducted. Jolly’s husband, it was determined at the time, died by suicide. His siblings only became suspicious when others in Jolly’s orbit started dying under similar circumstances. They filed a few RTIs, and learned that Jolly hadn’t been forthright about certain details surrounding her husband’s demise. The police was given the go-ahead by the court to exhume the bodies of all six people she was suspected of having killed, but they couldn’t collect conclusive evidence tying Jolly to the deaths. They did, however, find a bag of cyanide at her home — the convenience of this discovery certainly raised a few eyebrows — which was enough to charge her with the crimes.

Rojo and Renji Thomas, the brother and sister of Jolly’s dead husband, are featured prominently in the film, as is the lead investigator in the case, KG Simon. Jolly’s elder son appears on camera, not once referring to her as his mother, but choosing instead to call her ‘that woman’, or simply, ‘Jolly’. We also hear from a couple of psychologists who frankly don’t have enough intimate information about either Jolly or the case to avoid flailing in the dark.

Curry & Cyanide recounts the story with a breakneck pace that positively eliminates any possibility of cross-examination. And that’s one of the film’s biggest problems. While many have theorised that Jolly annihilated her immediate family because she wanted to seize control of their assets, Curry & Cyanide struggles to paint a clear picture of who she was as a person. We’re told that she was outgoing and generally well-liked in the close-knit community of Koodathayi — she claimed to have a respectable job as a professor, which was later discovered to be a fabrication — but many will walk out of the film with the same amount of information about Jolly as they did walking in. The case was, after all, widely covered, especially after her arrest.

The film also suffers from the noticeable lack of actual, on-location footage. While there are plenty of talking heads and loads of news clippings, Curry & Cyanide is missing a sense of direction, and a sense of place. It’s entirely possible that the movie was produced remotely. The folks behind Prime Video’s recent Dancing on the Grave series made sure to film around the cursed Bangalore home where the crimes it covered took place. And Netflix’s own House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths cleverly captured the claustrophobia of the Delhi home where 11 members of the same family took their own lives in a mass suicide. But the recreations that Curry & Cyanide often finds itself resorting to in the absence of real drama are rather ineffective.

Nothing, however, is more dissatisfying than the gaping holes in logic that the movie glosses over. Why, for instance, did Rojo and Renji launch a crusade against Jolly only after they discovered that their inheritance had been snatched away from them? Who were Jolly’s two alleged accomplices; the men who supposedly supplied the cyanide to her? And did the police actually plant evidence in her home, as the movie briefly implies? But more than anything else, what remains absolutely murky from start to finish are Jolly’s motivations. Why in the world did she kill six people at all?

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It’s one thing for true-crime documentaries to be open-ended. Fans of the genre are often willing to forgive unresolved endings if the storytelling is gripping enough. But here, you can’t help but feel that there wasn’t enough material available to justify a well-rounded film in the first place.

Curry & Cyanide
Director – Christo Tomy
Rating – 2/5