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From 'Mandala Murders' to 'Andhera,' Indian OTT is Finally Daring to be Ambitious
From ritualistic murder mysteries to supernatural thrillers, Indian streaming shows are prioritising originality over commercial safety, even when the results are gloriously messy.
It’s been a fascinating couple of fortnights for the Indian streaming space. None of the big-ticket shows (yes, that’s a term now) have made a dent in cinema discourse, but one trait stands out: ambition. Regardless of the results, there has been a distinct desire to create something original — and, in some cases, new. This may sound like the least one should expect in 2025, but one also needs to understand the commercialisation of mainstream Bollywood to appreciate what the long-form Hindi productions are doing (or trying to do). The jury might be out on how effective they are, but there is no denying the sense of agency and opportunity.
Take Mandala Murders (Netflix), for instance. The eight-episode crime thriller revolves around two small-town cops investigating a gruesome and ritualistic series of murders. There’s a lot going on across timelines: a secret cult revival, shadowy caves and thumb-eating machines, divine entities, political rivalries, body-part horror, paranormal madness, mythological figures, generational revenge arcs, science-versus-religion showdowns and ridiculous twists. It’s mostly a mess, but it’s a mess in the right direction — one in pursuit of originality and world-building in an age of intolerance and adaptations. While watching it, and barely understanding much of the narrative, I couldn’t help but admire the scale of failure. The bar is low, but intent (even without solid execution) is a start. The shows that get both right — like Black Warrant or Black White & Gray — are the ones that endure. The tried-and-tested templates, like the Criminal Justice franchise, are transient and ‘safe’ hits: popular without being memorable.
Ambition versus Execution
Another example of artistic ambition is Andhera (Prime Video), an exhausting but proactive supernatural thriller centred on a potential mental-health pandemic in Mumbai. The concept is more seductive than the actual eight-episode slog, because the show literalises its metaphors and descends into narrative chaos featuring evil pharma conspiracies, tacky demonic entities, consciousness-upload machines, immortality potions and much more. Yet it’s hard to deny that Andhera, like Mandala Murders, is the sort of imagination-driven and big-swing television that wouldn’t exist if not for the OTT ecosystem. How those platforms react to creativity, engage in mass storytelling, or get paranoid about being too expressive is a conversation for another day. For now, it’s perhaps important to recognise that shows like these crawl so that another Khauf can run in the future.
At the other end of the spectrum, there’s the herd-mentality syndrome. Two patriotic espionage dramas across different platforms — Salakaar and Saare Jahan Se Accha — released within a week of one another in early August. The clincher is that both spy thrillers revolve around the same slice of history and mission. Both feature a semi-fictitious Indian intelligence agent — loosely inspired by NSA Ajit Doval’s 1970s’ career — who heroically sabotages Pakistan’s covert nuclear plans. One series is craftier and better than the other, but the point is that the two productions locate the same formula to milk a current mood, much like their violent feature-length counterparts. There’s nothing wrong in sticking to a template that works, but if the intent is to be watched rather than tell a story, it’s called “content.” In other words, I’ll take an audacious failure over a derivative success any day of the week.
Good Intentions
Ambition alone isn’t always enough for a viewer investing a whole weekend, of course. There’s a case to be made against a sprawling character-based series like Rangeen (Prime Video), which has everything going for it only to go nowhere. The dark comedy about a chain-smoking man who becomes a gigolo after his wife cheats on him is far from an ideal watch. Even if there’s the desire to make something different and grounded, one can’t help but wonder if the writing thinks beyond the central gimmick.
Not enough is made of a cast of Vineet Kumar Singh and Rajshri Deshpande, which is strange in an era where artistes like them are responsible for the finest modern Hindi performances — Singh in Mukkabaaz (2018) and Deshpande in Trial by Fire (2023) — are more visible than ever.
Perhaps it’s not as easy for makers to marry purpose and passion in a medium that’s driven by eyeballs. This medium started differently a decade ago: young, hopeful and throwing things against a blank wall. But now it’s all grown-up and conscious of the world around us. The adults are not always right, but at least they’re adults.
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