Aranyak review: Raveena Tandon is at the front and centre of this inconsistent Netflix series

There is no dearth of suspects-and-red-herrings in this murder-mystery-thriller, created by Rohan Sippy, directed by Vinay Waikul, and written by Charudutt Acharya. And all sorts of characters– some with enough depth, some a bit undercooked– keep showing up as it progresses. The problem of plenty leads to bits of dense and confused plotting. There are spots of outright silliness: even the most free-with-their-fists cops don’t start slapping suspects around as soon as they set eyes on them. But Tandon’s Kasturi Dogra, a bad cook who is meant to be a good cop, has no such compunction, and after a while it gets trying. The attempts to prove that she’s a hick don’t do her any favours. Then there’s the non-stop emphasis on the ‘19 years’ between the appearance of the predator: almost every single character is made to repeat the phrase till we have it coming out of our ears. And oh, an item number masquerading as a wedding song, filmed as if it would in Bollywood, is given a tiny fraction of time.

What really works is the setting. As does the mostly well-done suspense : the big reveal manages to stay a surprise, though if you keep your eyes peeled you might start seeing where it’s all going. Location is everything– the ‘aranya’ (forest) is truly deep and dark, the paths serpentine, the twists matching the plot. Some of the characters are interesting : a young girl (Taneesha Joshi) being forced to study hard in order to crack the JEE, has an unsavoury secret. A no-account, jobless man (Vivek Madan) discovers that he has fallen out of love with his wife. A grizzled old cop (Ashutosh Rana) who saw the predator slip past him those many years back, is on the scent again. A gong for environmental concerns is banged : if we keep destroying their environment, leopards will come leaping at us, won’t they? But this card needed to have been played a little more smartly.

Raveena Tandon reminds us that there was always an actor beneath the flighty, fluffy girls she mostly got to play in her top Bollywood years. She is unafraid of appearing uncouth and crude, and is able to toughen up and soften when the occasion demands, even if the unsophisticated accent slips. But like the series itself, her character is inconsistent: in repose, and with her glam face on, she looks very far from the homely policewoman she is meant to be. Still, she gets a chance to be a full-bodied character here, not just a singing-dancing cipher. One of the nicer parts of the series is that she is not made into a ‘heroine’ or a ‘female hero’, striding about in slo-mo: this is a woman who is flawed and who knows it.

The steadying factor here is Parambrata Chatterjee’s Angad Malik, who stays on top of his past-and-present tracks, the former told in flashback featuring a terrible personal tragedy which never stops feeling contrived. He does a good job of freshening the trope of the new authority figure arriving from the outside, nursing his own troubles while trying to fix the vexed problems of the locals, especially in small towns which have their own unwritten rules.

Kasturi and Angad make a solid pair. And it feels like they will have more to do when we see them next.