Suchin Mehrotra reviews Raakh, the Amazon Prime Video series from director Prosit Roy and writer-creators Anusha Nandakumar and Sandeep Saket, for The Hollywood Reporter India. Inspired by the horrific 1978 Ranga-Billa case — the abduction and murder of siblings Geeta and Sanjay Chopra that shook Delhi and the nation — the show fictionalises the siblings as Suman and Sahil Arora (Divya Sharma and Vivaan Sharma), their devastated parents played by Sonali Bendre and Aamir Bashir, with Ali Fazal as SI Jayprakash, a young officer who puts everything on the line to win them justice. Suchin finds Raakh at its most potent and disquieting across its first two episodes, where Prosit's undeniable craft — Saumyananda Sahi's visuals and Anish John's sound in particular — keeps viewers in a state of near-constant dread, delivering a crime drama packaged as a horror story that is at once suffocating, immersive and terrifying.
From there, Suchin argues, the demands of longform storytelling seep in and conventional cracks begin to form, as the eight-episode series pads itself out with subplots, tacked-on cold opens and grandstanding statements about society that dilute its concentrated cocktail of pain, dread and grief — leaving him wondering whether a feature or a more contained series might have done this tragic tale greater justice. He's particularly uneasy about the decision to hand half the narrative to the killers, Babu (Akash Makhija) and Rajjo (Ramandeep Yadav), and the risk of a show more enamoured by its monsters than its victims, though he praises both performances and singles out Akash's chaotic, Jekyll-and-Hyde menace; Anshul Chauhan's underwritten journalist, by contrast, keeps pulling him out of the proceedings. Ali, however, is in fine form, bringing an aching sincerity to a dismissed rookie forced to prove himself against the prejudice of his caste. Suchin's THR Bottom Line: despite its questionable, overlong structure and stretches of contrived writing, Raakh is elevated by its craft and performances — a series he'll remember for its dread and despair. Raakh is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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