Adhura review: Occasionally spooky but unintentionally silly, Prime Video’s horror-thriller leaves something to be desired

To further complicate matters, in the days leading up to the grand reunion of the batch of 2007, a bullied young child named Vedant is seemingly possessed by a spirit. Not that anybody in the faculty declares it as such on the show, even though they’re fully aware of Vedant’s strange behaviour. After an initial failed attempt by the headmaster to have Vedant shipped off to his parents, it is decided that he must simply be kept hidden from public view — like Jane Eyre’s attic-dwelling metaphor — in the hope that his creepy antics don’t derail the reunion.

But if Vedant were to actually behave himself, we wouldn’t have a thriller, would we? As an appropriate response to the school’s apathy towards one of their pupils basically turning into Damien from The Omen, Vedant begins to unleash all sorts of anarchy upon the campus. The kid has been let down by both the adults and his peers — in addition to being mercilessly picked on, his parents don’t seem to care about him, and the school thinks of him as an embarrassment. It helps that Vedant is played by the young actor Shrenik Arora, who was so endearing in Hotstar’s The Night Manager remake recently. He is able to draw your empathy almost immediately, through cherubic innocence alone.

Adhura does a decent job of highlighting important themes such as abandonment, alienation and neglect, but it’s the telling that’s the problem. The show is far better directed than it is written. It’s a bit ironic that the same people — Ananya Banerjee and Gauravv K Chawla — were responsible for both. While they’re able to make excellent use of the misty atmosphere provided by our favourite cameo artist — The Lawrence School — the writing is so consistently dull that even at seven episodes long, the show feels like a bit of a slog. Far too much time is devoted to pointless subplots and uneven scare tactics, and the central mystery isn’t as compelling as the show thinks it is.

When the members of the 2007 batch begin dropping dead like flies in the present day timeline, the show sends Adhiraj on a quest to uncover the truth along with a faculty member named Supriya, played by Rasika Duggal in the show’s most affecting performance. It is, however, a little frustrating to watch Adhiraj stumble in the dark — often quite literally — only to arrive at a conclusion that we’d been made aware of several episodes ago.

Banerjee and Chawla appear to construct scenes with an uncommon patience (for a Hindi ghost story), but this is an illusion; the dialogues, especially in the early episodes, are thick with exposition. “Bina bataye America college apply kar diya,” Malvika scolds Adhiraj in an early flashback scene, letting the audience know, in the clunkiest manner imaginable, that Adhiraj will be leaving her very soon. Moments later in the same scene, Malvika plants a quick kiss on Adhiraj’s cheek, and he recoils. “Dude, your dad might be here… I know you like to punish him because unki vajeh se you have to study in an all-boys school…” he says, explaining why she’s the sole female student there. Surely they could’ve found a more graceful way of communicating these details?

School of Lies did a far better job of handling exposition in its early episodes, which is precisely (and understandably) when most writers feel pressured to hold on to the audience’s attention. But while that show deliberately drip-fed the audience, Adhura chooses instead to bludgeon you over the head with background stuff — we are also told, verbally, that Adhiraj is on anxiety meds, and that he regrets how things ended between him and Ninad. The show doesn’t allow these characters to simply exist in the flashbacks; every scene is designed to push the plot forward, and not enough time is devoted to fleshing them out.

There was such a rich opportunity here to make something more meaningful, or alternately, more fun. “Aap bhoot-pret mein vishwas karte hain?” Adhiraj asks Rahul Dev’s cop character towards the end of the show, immediately identifying the tone that Banerjee and Chawla should have strived for. But Adhura is too dour for its own good, and a the risk of being too on-the-nose, it leaves something to be desired.

Adhura
Creators – Ananya Banerjee, Gauravv K Chawla
Cast – Ishwak Singh, Zoa Morani, Shrenik Arora, Rasika Dugal, Rahul Dev, Arjun Deswal, Poojan Chhabra
Rating – 2.5/5