‘Daldal’ Series Review: Bhumi Pednekar In A Corny Crime Thriller That Loses Its Way 

I like how Daldal opens. A woman is seated with her older friend at a local bakery. She does not look pleased; they’re discussing a love poem written by a boy across from them. Her friend teases her. They’re used to his lecherous gaze. Suddenly the two women get a call and leave. We soon learn that they were actually ACP Rita Ferrera (Bhumi Pednekar) and sub-inspector Indu Mhatre (the ever-watchable Geeta Agrawal Sharma) waiting to raid a brothel in Mumbai’s red-light area. The boy was actually a student, because Rita had infiltrated the area as an undercover teacher. It’s one thing for Rita to pretend to be someone else, it’s another for the series itself to pretend that she’s someone else. After the raid, we see her come home to a fiancè cooking dinner. He brings her some wine. We expect her to soften. Within seconds, we learn that this is, in fact, a couple on the verge of separation; one of them is moving out. This is a recurring trick — it shows us the expectation panel before hitting us with reality. It’s like even the camera is not in on the illusion: it bakes the average Indian viewer’s conditioning and gaze into the film-making. This extends to the end of the episode. The dual identity of a killer is revealed; the victims, too, seem to be older males who hide behind the veil of virtue.

This foreshadowing offsets the familiarity of the template. Based on the book Bhendi Bazaar by Vish Dhamija, the 7-episode crime drama draws parallels between the lives of the haunted female cop and her twisted counterpart. They’re two sides of the same coin: broken products of the same patriarchal society. Rita has a drug dealer and imagines stuffing the mouths of men who piss her off; the killer has a drug-addled partner and stuffs the mouths of the victims after slitting their wrists. Their backstories involve troubled mothers who damage their children in an attempt to isolate them from a predatory world. Rita is promoted to DCP but she feels like a cheap PR stunt in a sexist Crime Branch; her boss micromanages her, her rivals are snarky and jealous. The killer weaponises this very perception to continue the spree in the shadows of Mumbai. One is ‘braver’ than the other: the cop has dark impulses, but it’s the criminal who acts upon them. Both are attached to weaker men who can’t handle the pressure of living.

Some of the character touches are neat. Like when Rita refuses to accept a male constable’s hand while climbing a rock; or the scene where she drops all pretence and literally throws a ‘girly’ tantrum in front of her boss to get her way. There’s also a lovely Kishore Kumar-coded ballad (“Tu Hai Toh Hai”) shared by two hostile misfits; it makes them feel like a retro couple reclaiming the memories of a Bombay that once preyed on them. The score does more writing than the screenplay. The narrative, too, is designed to present characters who are revealed with hindsight. At first it’s like climbing onto a story that’s already in motion; their past is drip-fed to us in subsequent episodes through traumatic memories and triggered flashbacks. I particularly like Aditya Rawal’s performance as the heroin-addled former ‘juvie’ and prime suspect. He humanises a cliched character, exhibiting a tragic blankness I last saw on Ranvir Shorey’s face in Traffic Signal.

But Daldal’s failure is Mardaani-coded. The broad-strokes treatment makes it feel like a series that’s torn between being pulpy and serious. You can tell that it struggles to adapt the source material; the backstories featuring a Russian sex worker and an encounter specialist don’t provide the context they should. The office politics and chauvinism undermining Rita are flattened; the men out to sabotage her speak like petty comedy-sketch figures. The investigation itself plays out like a whodunit even though it’s not one; it’s more of a whydunit that keeps offering answers that aren’t interesting enough. It doesn’t help that the show lacks a geocultural identity — the setting is 1990s-Bombay-gangster-core, which is basically a simplistic way of showing the underbelly without exploring it. I suppose the film-making could have been more curious; even some green-screen effects are below par. It’s in stark contrast to creator Suresh Triveni’s Jalsa, a female-led morality drama that deftly wrote the city and its social machinations into the plot. Daldal gets too preoccupied with the twists and gimmicks (Rita’s hallucinations of her snide dead mom are television-soap-level choices). As a result, the milieu barely registers. Neither do the stakes; Rita’s unraveling happens like it’s a concept. It’s obvious that the case will heal her, but her healing feels predestined and hurried.

Bhumi Pednekar’s role should work on paper. It’s in the zone of her journalist character in Bhakshak, the underrated crime thriller based on the Muzaffarpur shelter-home case. But I don’t think she’s been directed well here. Rita’s sullen scowl becomes a surrogate for narrative depth; her trauma and dysfunctionality are rooted in a binary reading of the protagonist. It’s a lost opportunity to fashion an ambiguous hero out of someone who copes with her own imposter syndrome with bouts of performative rage. It’s as if the series constantly resists the complexity of Rita in favour of a conventional cat-and-mouse chase. A lot of this stems from the show’s men-telling-women-stories problem. (Compare this to something like Khauf or even Dahaad, where the female characters were rarely reduced to their roles in the narrative). Both sides of the law suffer from this problem; their mental health manifests physically rather than psychologically. Samara Tijori’s potential is blunted by it too; promising as she was in Masoom (2022), Daldal is more interested in the volume of her character. Everything looks a notch higher than it should. They behave the way most men think powerful and agency-fuelled women behave — on the brink of “females-in-male-dominated-fields” hashtags, whether it’s serial-killing or law enforcement.

One of the perpetrators moonlights as a crime journalist for an online portal, and ends up reporting on the very spree they’re responsible for. It’s a wicked subplot that the series doesn’t milk enough. I couldn’t help but imagine a pitch-black comedy about an ambitious scribe in Mumbai who’s so desperate to make it in a post-truth media landscape that they resort to engineering their own headlines — first murder people and then have unrestricted access to the details. Anything for a career in this cruel job market: a real-world (and recession-coded) version of the Clark Kent and Superman dynamic, perhaps. (Or better, imagine if I wanted to review movies so desperately that I resort to making them just so that I can write on them). In terms of duality, that’s the Daldal I’d enjoy. But it’s not the one we are shown. Instead we see a curated cat-and-mouse thriller that’s consistently not as clever as it thinks it is. And the journalism is reduced to a footnote — yet again. Maybe sometimes, the best path is the one we are culturally conditioned to expect, not socially wired to consume.