I don’t know about you but the viewer in me does feel a tad cheated when a whodunit plucks a character out of nowhere in its penultimate moments and pronounces them as the killer. The killer, who along with the protagonists, we as viewers have invested time and brain cells to put together the various pieces of an intricate jigsaw puzzle, to zero in on. This is especially true for a thriller like Aranyak, which slowly and semi-successfully sucks you in during the course of its eight episodes, peppers its narrative with enough red herrings along the way, but somehow falls short when it comes to coming up with a satisfactory finale.
That’s a major/ minor gripe, depending on what side of the thriller payoff divide you are on. To be honest, the rest of Aranyak — or at least a large part of it — is a gripping watch, boosted by an ensemble cast led by two highly competent acts.
When we first meet them, Kasturi Dogra (played by Raveena Tandon, in her web debut) and Angad Malik (Parambrata Chattopadhyay) couldn’t be more different. They are both cops all right, but their ways of functioning are completely different. Kasturi, policing the sleepy town of Sironah, carries small-town prejudices, many of which get further magnified when Angad, the cop from the big city, arrives to replace her as she prepares to go on a year-long break. But with Sironah being rocked by the gruesome rape and murder of a tourist teen and the mystery getting more complicated by the minute and eventually hitting too close to home, the two find themselves joining forces, realising along the way that they have more in common than they initially thought.
Even as it operates as a slow-burn thriller, with its setting (Aranyak has been shot in Himachal Pradesh) lending it a touch of Nordic noir, family is at the core of the story. Kasturi’s family — husband, teenaged daughter, and most significantly, her father-in-law (a former cop, played by Ashutosh Rana) — find themselves inexorably sucked into the central premise as key players, even as she has to walk the familiar tightrope of balancing work and home duties. Angad’s painful family history, with an important aspect of it left in limbo years before, finds an unexpected thread in the murder investigation he plunges into as soon as he steps into Sironah.
With its roots borrowed from folklore and an urban legend of a supernatural killer on the prowl two decades after it claimed its first victim, and enough suspects with discreditable pasts and dubious intentions, Aranyak soon becomes a juicy, if sometimes confusing, thriller whose dense plotting packs in a lesson or more about beasts, more two-legged than four-pawed.
Director Vinay Waikul, drawing from a script written by Charudutt Acharya, builds the intrigue well, with Kasturi and Angad, after their initial run-in, working in tandem to solve the intricate case, even as they form an unspoken bond as colleagues. That change, however, comes off a bit hurried in a series that has eight episodes at its disposal. Having said that, Raveena and Param have a natural chemistry which works well for the moments they share on screen. Raveena, effortlessly inhabits the part of a woman watching her personal and professional lives getting intertwined. Param, as usual, is rock-solid, standing out as both the voice of reason and playing the emotional bits of a helpless father very well. Aranyak’s supporting acts — Zakir Hussain, Meghna Malik, Indraneil Sengupta, Vivek Madan, along with Ashutosh Rana — are its strongest suit.
With its Mare of Easttown meets Mystic River look and feel, Aranyak does well with its atmospherics. The dense fog, thick forests and dark alleys naturally lend themselves to a thriller like this and Waikul, along with cinematographer Saurabh Goswami, crafts moods and moments — political plans being hatched, bodies being disposed off, the suspect count constantly rising — that keep you hooked.
Aranyak, to be fair, sometimes slips into the ridiculous and is guilty of a few loose ends with the ultimate payoff, as mentioned at the beginning, really not doing justice to what has played out before it. But the final glimpse of what will invariably greenlight a sequel still keeps us invested. For beasts are everywhere. In the jungle. And outside it.
