36 Days Cast/ Actors: Neha Sharma as Farah Zaidi, Purab Kohli as Rishi Jaykar, Shruti Seth as Radhika, Chandan Roy Sanyal as Tony Walia, Chahat Vig as Tony’s wife Sia, Sharib Hashmi as Vinod Shinde, Amruta Khanvilkar as Lalita, Sushant Divgikar as transgender Tara/Tarun, Kenneth Desai as Denzel Machado
36 Days Director: Vishal Furia
36 Days Release Date: July 12, 2024
36 Days Available On: Sony LIV OTT Platform
36 Days Released/ Available In Languages: Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada
36 Days Number Of Episodes: 8
36 Days Episode Duration: 40 minutes (approx each episode)
36 Days Critic Review:
The thrill of OPT (Other People’s Tensions) keeps the buzz alive in an upscale residential society in Goa. Every cupboard has skeletons tumbling out, every family has its hush-hush secrets.
Today, Farah Zaidi (Neha Sharma) is dead. Somebody put a knife through her abdomen.
36 days ago, the glamorous air hostess had arrived, tugging a trolley bag.
One dead woman, many suspects. Almost everybody in the verdant housing complex
wanted her out of the way. The ‘why’s are all around but whodunnit?
Director Vishal Furia keeps you guessing.
It is actually a simplistic plot without a smartly strategised murder at work. The original UK series 35 Days that Anahata Menon has adapted, picks one of the half-a-dozen suspects as the perpetrator, the rest revolving around the victim as they grapple with familiar familial issues.
Overseeing the plush property is Tony Walia (Chandan Roy Sanyal), as oily as any sleaze can get. His new wife Sia (Chahat Vig) is asked by friends, “Is the oversized ring an overcompensation for the size of other stuff?” That’s girlie talk, giggle, giggle. With Sia comes uninvited transgender Tara/Tarun (Sushant Divgikar). Tony who can’t bear Tara, has just asked her crudely in the restroom, “Tu khada hoke moottha hai?” But he can’t get the pest out of his house coz Tara is just so close to Sia.
Tony the sleaze, openly lusting after Farah, could well have knifed the attractive woman who lived alone. Tara who needed big money for surgery could’ve done it too.
Uncle Denzi (Kenneth Desai as Denzel Machado) likes his trysts with porn in the privacy of his art studio. Wife Binny (Shernaz Patel) bakes cakes and is a wacko. Son Riad (Faisal Rashid) is divorced, unsocial and can’t bear the mother’s nagging. Depression is always lurking around the corner and when Denzi paints himself into a corner, Binny blames that b…, Farah.
Right from the first frame, tension is writ on the faces of Radhika (Shruti Seth) and Rishi Jaykar (Purab Kohli), the power couple, his fourth book about to be published. She doesn’t like the way Rishi’s hormones act up like a teenager at the sight of Farah.
Keeping up with the Joneses are Lalita (Amruta Khanvilkar) and Vinod Shinde (Sharib Hashmi). He, always aware that he’s just a manager at the local casino which is also a den of goons. She, a spendthrift, crassly desperate to fit in. With a druggie brother on the run and her penchant for splurging, Lalita has a parallel life going on silently. Could the bro have done it to Farah?
The Jaykars think the Shindes spoil the profile of the society. Cops bust a kids’ party, looking for drugs at the Shinde house. Who tipped them off and who called up to pull them off the raid abruptly?
Somebody’s watching from behind the curtains.
The calendar moves backwards as activities are traced from 36 days ago to the day Farah was found dead. What were her secrets and why did she plonk herself in the midst of these people, all alone?
With goons, drugs, therapy, two-timing men and women, men who fantasise and
masturbate, it’s clear that nobody’s aboveboard. Book launches have their pressures. A party where déclassé Radhika loudly declares that Farah is no air hostess, leads to women resenting the gorgeous single woman.
What’s Farah’s game? Why is she insidiously turning the residents against one another? In turn, everybody’s got their knife into her – but somebody got his or her knife into her too literally.
Although there’s no sequence that’s outstandingly never-seen-before and every issue has been told many times before, the coming together of disparate families with a murder at the centre, keeps it going. But the episodes are stretched, extraneous characters run around and the many songs (especially those sung by Tara who’s introduced as a star) don’t have riveting tunes. Also, most of the issues, like a wife having to work on the sly coz hubby won’t like it, are outdated, especially in a setting like Goa. And once complications, like the Jaykar couple’s palpable tensions, are sorted out, they seem unnecessary since one sane conversation could’ve ended it years ago.
The cast is professional with Sushant Divgikar impressive in the plum role of Tara/Tarun. Chandan Roy Sanyal is always good when he’s shady and ironically, Sharib Hashmi-Amruta Khanvilkar who hurl Marathi words like ‘halkat’ and ‘howratgiri’ at each other, play the downmarket couple with high-grade proficiency.
But I do have one question for Vishal Furia. Since when did speaking in English and Hindi translate into class and sophistication with a couple that speaks to each other in Marathi signifying the crass and the classless? You do seem to have an issue with regional languages, guys.
36 Days – Watch Or Not?: Watchable to see where it all leads to.
36 Days Review Score Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (i.e. 2.5/5)
36 Days Official Trailer:
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