Kohrra review: Suvinder Vicky, Barun Sobti starrer Netflix series is a life-affirming murder mystery

One of the most impressive elements of the six-part series is the way the village becomes the site from where everything flows. The names, a mix of desi and videshi, immediately speak of provenance: Satwinder aka Steve Dhillon (Manish Chaudhari) who lived in London for several years is now back in his ‘pind’; his estranged brother Manna (Varun Badola) never had to make a name-change to merge with the ‘goras’, because he has remained a son of the soil. Steve’s dead son is called Paul, and his stepson Liam: you wouldn’t know who was British-India, and who pure British, until you set eyes on them. The coming back home for an ‘arranged marriage’ after young men have presumably sowed their oats is such a commonplace occurrence that it doesn’t raise any eyebrows, even if the bridegroom’s brutal killing splits everything wide open.

Reclaiming roots, once abandoned, comes with attendant risks: the series asks us, without actually putting it in words, can you come home again? The answers blow down highways with trucks being driven at killer speeds, and bends wreathed in morning mists (the kohra of the title with a double r) which lead to fatal accidents, leaving us facing devastated families, and all-round misery. What we also see is a once-invincible, proud culture struggling to keep its ‘pug’ aloft, battling the pushes and pulls of the endless seduction of foreign lands and the easily available drugs, and the sprouting of several subcultures – young people talking of ‘Insta’ lives, creating jangly music in home-grown studios, dreaming of fleeing to another land, wondering who they are, and who they eventually want to be.

A series like this one, which aims for authenticity, can be helped by perfect casting: these faces, some whom we are familiar with, and some who are fresh, look and sound as if they were born and raised in that village. They are all excellent: Chaudhary as the conflicted father blind to his clearly different progeny; Barun Sobti as the lusty ‘chhada’ (singleton) in a complicated threesome with his brother and sister-in-law, using his fists as easily as his tongue to lash out at suspects; Varun Badola (glad to see this terrific actor in a worthy role) as the younger brother simmering with resentment; Amaninder Singh as Happy, desperate for validation from his father. And, above all, Suvinder Vicky, so good in ‘Meel Patthar’, as the senior policeman, digging in deep to discover his softer side. Vicky’s Balbir, a craggy map of suppressed desire from which emerges his wanting to be a better man, is, to me, the beating heart of the series.

There are some sparkling women in this collection of incomplete men. Balbir’s daughter Nimrat (Harleen Sethi ) trying to get out of an unwanted marriage, is a heartbreaker that you root for. Paul’s bride, Veera (Aanand Priya), distraught not as much about the death of her finace as the scotching of her dreams of living ‘abroad’. Garundi’s sister-in-law pulls off a tough role of a woman who wants more without us judging her: Ekta Sodhi, playing the madly, deeply besotted Rajji parjai, is spot-on. His ‘would-be’, a pert little thing who works in a nail parlour, with notions of herself. As a woman struggling to forget her past, and forgive the man responsible for her plight, Ekavali Khanna is impactful. And Rachel Shelley (remember her as Aamir Khan’s dream woman in ‘Lagaan’) turns up here as a woman who has nurtured a young boy, and kept his secret within her, till, one day, she can’t.

Crime and punishment is not always a neat equation which goes hand-in-hand. Sometimes, the things that we do have large footprints, and we are left to walk that path in search of redemption, never knowing if we will find it. ‘Kohrra’ is about a killing, and yet it is life-affirming, in the way it mines the truth.

Kohrra creators: Gunjit Chopra, Diggi Sisodia, Sudip Sharma
Kohrra cast: Suvinder Vicky, Barun Sobti, Harleen Sethi, Manish Chaudhary, Varun Badola, Amaninder Singh, Rachel Shelley