Can a person be born evil, or does society shape them into one? This is the question that ZEE5’s Gonoshatru, a five-part anthology seeks to explore. The show digs into Bengal’s most terrifying criminal legends — from the colonial brothels of Calcutta to the seedy underbelly of the modern city.
Directed by five filmmakers, each episode reconstructs the story of a different killer: Sajal Barui, Kamaruzzaman Sarkar (the “Chainman”), Trailokya Tarini, Rashid Khan, and Hubba Shyamal. This isn’t a crime thriller in the conventional sense. Gonoshatru sits somewhere between a documentary and a dramatised non-fiction. The problem, however, is that the series doesn’t always find its footing.
The first episode revolves around Sajal Barui. Barely 16 when he murdered his father, stepmother, and stepbrother in 1993, Sajal was the poster child for a society gone wrong. Ayush Das plays him not as a raving madman, but a wounded animal that’s learned to bite back. Yet the episode, directed by Shamik Raychowdhury, never quite grips. The 1990s backdrop feels poorly recreated, and the script skips over the more cinematic parts of Sajal’s later life: his daring prison breaks, his brush with the Mumbai underworld, and his eventual disappearance.
The second episode, Chainman, is a far more confident piece of filmmaking. Based on Kamaruzzaman Sarkar, who strangled women in Kalna between 2013 and 2019 using a bicycle chain, is gritty from the start. Debopriyo Mukherjee is extraordinary as the killer. His body language is restrained, his speech in the local dialect authentic. Director Abhirup Ghosh mounts the story as a slow burn. But even here, the execution undercuts the tension. The episode begins by spelling out the facts — number of victims, years of activity, cause of death — leaving little to discover. Periodic cutaways to experts explaining his psychology also blunt the raw terror.
If the first two episodes are uneven, the third — Trailokya Tarini — is where the series truly finds its rhythm. Set in British-era Calcutta, it revisits the life of India’s first recorded female serial killer, who lured and drowned young women in the name of salvation. Paoli Dam gives a mesmerising performance as Trailokya, capturing both her cruelty and her heartbreak. There’s a scene where she gazes into a mirror, torn between vanity and guilt, and it’s one of the most haunting moments in the series. Director Madhura Palit handles the period detailing with finesse.
Next comes Rashid Khan, the self-styled ‘satta king’ whose empire of gambling and extortion ruled parts of Kolkata’s underworld for decades. Subrat Dutta plays Rashid like a man built on contradictions — ruthless yet oddly sentimental, his crimes motivated not by greed but by a desperate desire to give his daughter a better life. Director Sayan Dasgupta keeps the camera close, almost claustrophobic, as if trapping Rashid within his own sins. The emotional core — his guilt and the tragedy of the Bowbazar blast that took away his son-in-law — makes this one of the more moving episodes.
The finale, Hubba Shyamal, is the most purely cinematic entry of the five. Directed by Srimanta Senguptta, it chronicles the reign of terror of the infamous gangster whose “paite cut” killings turned him into a legend of fear. Rudranil Ghosh gives an astonishingly controlled performance — blank-eyed, detached, and terrifyingly calm. The violence is suggested rather than shown, making it all the more disturbing. Here, the documentary-style inserts finally find their rhythm within the narrative instead of interrupting it.
Across its episodes, Gonoshatru circles back to a recurring idea — that every monster is, at some level, a mirror of the society that made them. Each killer’s story begins in a household marked by neglect, humiliation, or abuse. The show asks, are they really the “enemies of the people”, or products of a people who looked away too long?