A teenage girl’s body is found in a pond. A cop, on the verge of transfer, is pulled back into the job she thought she could leave behind. From this familiar setup begins Search: The Naina Murder Case, Rohan Sippy’s six-part series now streaming on JioHotstar. The show is less about who killed Naina and more about what gets lost when justice becomes a spectacle.
The writing by Radhika Anand and Shreya Karunakaran follows the well-worn grammar of crime thrillers: a body, a trail of suspects, a web of deceit spreading through college corridors and political chambers.
ACP Sanyukta Roy (Konkona Sensharma) is a protagonist we are very familiar with. She has a husband (Mukul Chadda) who feels increasingly alienated, a daughter (Mahi) who demands attention she can’t give, and a job that consumes what’s left of her emotional energy.
But what anchors the show is Sanyukta’s moral clarity. She is a woman forced to confront the gap between justice as an idea and justice as it functions in a system weighed down by hierarchy and power.
The show adapts the Danish series The Killing, but instead of copying its tone, it attempts to fit that moral dilemma into the Indian context, where the lines between crime and politics often blur into each other.
The murder of Naina, a bright college student, quickly becomes a public trial. News cameras camp outside the police station, politicians posture on TV, and social media does what it always does — turn a tragedy into content. Within this chaos, Sanyukta tries to focus on the work.
Rohan Sippy keeps the storytelling mostly grounded. The camera lingers on faces rather than violence. Conversations unfold in the language of fatigue — cops who’ve seen too much, families who can’t comprehend what they’ve lost. The pacing mirrors the investigation itself — slow, methodical, uncertain of where it’s headed.
Where Search falters is in its political and emotional subtext. The script hints at a nexus of power — a local politician (Shiv Panditt), his aides, their secrets — but stops short of digging deeper. You sense the outline of something bigger, but the show chooses to stay safe, unwilling to get its hands too dirty.
Still, the series holds together because Konkona Sensharma gives it gravity. She plays Sanyukta without embellishment. There’s a moment where she simply looks at a photograph of the dead girl and you can tell what it costs her to keep feeling in a profession that demands detachment.
Surya Sharma, as her new colleague Jai Kanwal, plays well against her restraint. Their early friction — a young cop bristling under female authority — slowly turns into a partnership based on earned respect.
Shiv Panditt’s politician carries the right measure of ambiguity; you can’t tell if his guilt is moral or criminal. Iravati Harshe and Sagar Deshmukh as Naina’s grieving parents bring weight to scenes that could have turned theatrical.
By the later episodes, as the investigation deepens and new names emerge, you start noticing what the series is really interested in: the moral fatigue of those expected to remain unshaken. You realise that Sanyukta’s compassion is her only way of surviving the ugliness she sees every day.