Student Of The Year: After Dark reinvents the franchise as a high-stakes thriller, ditching the glossy campus vibe for an intense exploration of youth competition and emotional struggles. Directed by Reema Maya, the series premieres on JioHotstar, featuring Shanaya Kapoor in a double role, showcasing her commitment to embodying contrasting characters with depth and realism.
If you catch filmmaker Reema Maya now, in the completion stage of Student Of The Year: After Dark, she’s essentially running her own chat show: Coffee with Maya. Lifting a battle-worn black coffee mug to the screen during our Zoom call—her third cup by 1 PM—she jokes that she has a "debilitating caffeine addiction" brought on by post-production work.
"We’re right at the finish line, so the exhaustion is completely eclipsed by the adrenaline gushing and the butterflies coming," she smiles.
It is understandable. When Karan Johar launched Student of the Year in 2012, it birthed a pristine, glossy campus film blueprint. Fourteen years later, the franchise is getting a radical overhaul.
Produced by Dharmatic Entertainment and premiering on JioHotstar on November 13, Student Of The Year: After Dark has ditched the sunshine and sequins for a high-stakes thriller, spearheaded by Shanaya Kapoor in a double role.
And steering this pivot is indie filmmaker Maya, best known for her visceral, Sundance-selected short Nocturnal Burger.
"Initially, I was a little confused just like most audiences about what Student of the Year 3 is supposed to be, and why I'm being approached for it," she says.
"And I remember Karan telling me, 'I want you to take it and make it your own.' If I really break it down, there are two things that excite me about the franchise: one is it's young adult as a genre, and the second one is it's a competition series. So how do I take these two elements and create something that is a conversation I want to have with the youth today?"
In an interview with THR India, Reema discusses the genesis of After Dark, collaborating with Karan Johar, steering clear of clichés, and the mental stamina required to pull off a massive streaming debut.
What did SOTY After Dark teach you about filmmaking that you didn't know before?
SOTY After Dark has taught me so many things. It's like my coming-of-age show in so many ways! I come from short-form filmmaking. I've been doing music videos, advertising and short films and the longest piece that I had made was 28 minutes, which is Nocturnal Journal. I went from that to making a six episode show and each episode is about 30-40 minutes long. The final episode is almost an hour. Like, it's insane. It's a whole other world!
This project taught me to look at filmmaking from a completely different perspective. It reminded me the power of writing and that if your foundation and characters are strong, everything else falls into place. It also taught me about stamina. It takes stamina to be the first person that started this process as a creator-writer and to be the last person making sure that it's what we all envisioned.
So what were the do's and don'ts when you began making this series?
I knew that I don't want to show sex and I don't want to show drugs. I want this to be an emotionally intense experience. But I don't want to show those things and the youth indulging in those things because that's not what the story is about for me.
The second thing was to think really hard about what I'm trying to say through this project to my audience. And the conversation that I really wanted to have was that we're living in a world where our youth is constantly put in an intense competition with each other, on so many levels.
You are competing for attention online, you're competing for likes, for shares, you're competing for marks, you're competing for jobs. We're just in this intensely competitive environment. How does that really affect young minds? How does that affect your relationships with your friends, your peers, who are also your competitors? That was the theme that I truly wanted to explore.
And a fun personal challenge that I want to take on as the writer-director was how do I take commercial tropes of characters and then sort of dissect them psychologically.
But were there any references of past films that you kept in mind for the palette?
Not at all. I started by fleshing out my themes. Once that happens, everything else — the visual identity, the pacing, the characters, the design — is built from their.
The visual aspect is something I'm very passionate about. You'll see it across a lot of my work. On this particular project, I knew that there's a very specific colour palette I want to adhere to. It was almost like an internal code of colours. Once you and everyone sees it, I'll be able to share in depth what my secret code system of colours was.
Take me through the writing process. How long did it take and did you watch SOTY 1 to understand the commercial beats?
I started with watching SOTY 1! The first conversation with Karan and Somen (Mishra) set the palette for me. When they said, take it and make it your own, they really stood by that word and allowed me to jump in and reimagine the franchise for current times...
There is a certain cultural moment that our youth is experiencing and I think there is a beautiful passion and angst to the younger lot of any generation, to the idea of youth. That angst, I think, has very naturally found its way into the show.
What did it take to get this ensemble on board?
When I met Shanaya, who leads the series, I was pleasantly surprised by how committed she was to doing right by not one but two characters, who are quite opposite to each other. In our first conversation, I asked her about what her experiences were when she was 18 or 19, what high school felt like, what is the world that she comes from. So we connected on that level.
And as we went into prep, I realised she's a director's actor. She's prepared, hardworking. She never forgets a line, never forgets a continuity action. Another thing that really surprised me about her was that she was completely willing to give all of herself to physically embody Aditi's character. She cut her hair short and was excited to have a very de-glammed look. Not only did we not have makeup, I told her to stop using conditioner! I told we were doing minus of glam, making her look the part of a grieving sister in a very realistic way.
From a writer's point of view, what was a particularly challenging bit for you to crack?
I was careful about trying to get the language and tonality of the characters right. Because it's a slightly tricky one. You want them to be distinctive individuals. You want them to be true to their generation. But you also don't want it to feel gimmicky, right? And you want there to be natural chemistry.
I wrote the dialogues with that in mind and then I did a lot of rehearsals to see how those conversations are playing out, made revisions accordingly. One beautiful thing that happened was that the friend groups that are supposed to exist in the show also naturally formed during rehearsals. So everyone got aligned organically.