Kaala Star Cast/ Actors: Rohan Vinod Mehra as Shubendhu Mukherjee, Avinash Tiwary as Ritwik, Taher Shabbair as Naman Arya, and Elisha Mayor as Aloka.
Kaala Director: Bejoy Nambiar
Kaala Release Date: 15 September 2023
Kaala Available On: Disney+ Hotstar
Kaala Released/ Available In Languages: Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, and Kannada
Kaala OTT Platform: Disney+ Hotstar
Kaala Season: 1
Kaala Number Of Episodes: 8
Kaala Release Pattern: All episodes released
Kaala Episode Duration: 45 minutes
Kaala Critic Review:
Writer-director Bejoy Nambiar’s explorations of the dark side of humans take him to the Indo-Bangla border this time with the very title indicating the splash of blackness in the eight-episode first season.
Add to it Nambiar’s unflinching filming of violence, wickedness and aberrations, with a spray of abuses in various languages (there’s also a ‘mudevi’, Goddess of misfortune, the opposite of Lakshmi, thrown by a Tamizh-speaking CBI officer at a female colleague), for the full flavour of the thriller on reverse hawala. That’s money routed back illegally to fund nefarious activities.
It’s a jalebi for quite a while. There are different timelines that hark back to 1977 and unrelated threads dangled all over. They somehow lead up to patriot-turned-traitor Shubendhu Mukherjee (Rohan Vinod Mehra).
His son, Intelligence Bureau officer Ritwik (Avinash Tiwary), has grown up battling the absence of a doting father and fighting the label of being a traitor’s progeny.
Ritwik and team, on the trail of socially applauded businessman Naman Arya (Taher Shabbair), too well-known and well-connected to be touched, sniff a master plot that must be destroyed before fruition.
Tunnels at the Indo-Bangladesh border that were sealed after the latter was liberated from Pakistan, a past where dad’s duties as soldier meant his going away for long periods which sent Ritwik into a sulk as a kid, his mother sending off dad with the blessing, “Be safe…or be brave”, the meanness of the border security that orders the wife and son of the traitor to vacate, the menace of the officer who rasps like a bully to little Ritwik, “Only the strong have the world in their grasp.” It’s a lot of baggage that’s crossed over into the new millennium.
There is another story in another timeline, another place. Of a greying Adinath Bagchi, another loving dad, but to footballer Aloka (Elisha Mayor).
With every episode a new intrigue enters. Bejoy, along with four other writers, unleashes it all. Corrupt influencers, closet lesbians, homosexual officers, a twisted transgender, patriotism, secret informers, moles in the department, frustrations of the falsely labelled, bonds between half-siblings who didn’t know of each other’s existence until the death of the man who was their link, background rap in Bengali, chases, escapes, killings, international money laundering and a political coup that must be stopped.
It takes a while for all the disparate threads to coalesce. Especially with unknown callers from New York and London getting into the act.
At the end, you do wonder what actors like Shakti Kapoor were doing out there. Or at the nebulous track of a super vamp called Vandana who threatens the super wicked but ultimately plays no substantial part.
But one element that makes Kaala stand out as different is the setting which moves from an overexposed, crime-infested Uttar Pradesh and a terror-strewn Kashmir to the less frequently visited Indo-Bangla border. Which allows a pot-pourri of Hindi, English, Bengali and a smattering of Tamizh with a bit of Malayalam.
There’s competence in most of the performances with brooding Avinash Tiwary looking like Ajay Devgn’s OTT counterpart. Mita Vashisht as the CM is pretty good in a Mamata mould. And Jiten Gulati as Balwant turned Ms Shakti Arya is unfeeling, irrespective of the gender.
Kaala Watch Or Not?: This is a watch for patrons of the noir genre.
Kaala Review Score Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (i.e. 2.5/5)
Kaala Official Trailer:
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