‘Kankhajura’ Series Review: A Solid Roshan Mathew Cannot Rescue a Scrambled Remake

Director: Chandan Arora
Writers: Chandan Arora, Sandeep Jain, Upendra Sidhaye
Cast: Roshan Mathew, Mohit Raina, Sarah Jane Dias, Ninad Kamat, Mahesh Krishna Shetty, Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju, Heeba Shah, Anant Jog, Usha Nadkarni
Streaming on: SonyLIV
Language: Hindi

The framework of Kankhajura is ripe with promise. It’s a revenge drama going through an identity crisis — it doesn’t behave like one for the most part, and every time the theme emerges, it feels a bit surprising. Based on an Israeli series called Magpie, Kankhajura (“centipede”) revolves around the sticky ‘rehabilitation’ of Ashu (Roshan Mathew), a young man released from prison after 14 years. There’s something shapeless about him. He looks innocent in a deranged way, shows signs of neurological damage, has a trauma-infused stutter, and freelances as a police mole. Most of all, Ashu remains needy for the validation of his older brother Max (Mohit Raina), a real-estate mogul who aids his reintegration into society without fully embracing his return.

At first, Ashu’s obsession looks conventional (cinematically of course; no obsession is really conventional). He wants to work for Max and share in his success, but on being stonewalled and infantilised, he starts to dismantle different aspects of the life Max has so carefully built. For a while, this unfolds like a sociopath thriller. Ashu weaponises his ‘madness’ and plays mind-games with almost everyone he knows; he’s a devious child in an adult’s body. It then emerges that Ashu might have taken the fall for a crime committed by Max and his business-partners-cum-childhood-friends — Pedro (Ninad Kamat) and Shardul (Mahesh Krishna Shetty) — all those years ago. It still haunts him, and he suddenly doesn’t know what to do with so much agency.

What’s interesting is that this journey of payback is offset by Ashu’s desire to just belong. There’s a nice touch that conveys how long he’s been locked behind bars; on his first night out in a disco, he does the macarena with a girl while the others are in trance mode. His love for his brother is genuine, but it’s also packed with the kind of resentment that stems from a lifetime of being bullied. He isn’t sure himself about whether he is avenging the past or simply making up for lost time. By setting Max’s world on fire, Ashu is almost striving to prove his credentials; it’s like one long and twisted job interview where the trick is to keep blindsiding the interviewer. He begins to sabotage his career (including a luxury-villa project), turn factions against each other, ruin friendships, and influence Max’s relationship with girlfriend Nisha (Sarah Jane Dias), the only person who empathises with Ashu (despite his nutjob-ness).

Roshan Mathew treats Ashu like the dream role it is. It’s a showy performance, but one that keeps the viewer interested in the man’s intent. In many scenes, it’s never clear if Ashu is acting or Mathew is, so even the over-the-top moments become part of the design. He plays it like an antagonist who thinks he’s the protagonist; the tics and body language go haywire whenever the character is threatened with sanity. Ashu finds solace in the arms of Aimee (Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju), a trans bakery owner trapped in an abusive affair. His gaze is refreshingly free of prejudice (for once, she is not reduced to a “condition”), but Mathew’s gait around her suggests that Ashu is a human who can’t help his feral nature. He keeps relapsing. Despite their misfit-unites bond, he ends up softening her for information — which, for someone like Aimee, is a bigger betrayal than the one society inflicts on her.

I also like that the adapted setting is Goa. It’s not the beachy and colourful Goa we’re used to seeing on screen — it’s the more modern and gentrified version, perpetually under construction and teeming with the sort of greedy infrastructural tensions that come disguised as opportunity. Max’s struggles as a builder are defined by a land that’s been reduced to tourist acres and political investments. A subplot involving a local godmother named Deshmukh Bai (Usha Nadkarni) and her family reveals a dissonance between the concept of heroes and villains. As a leader of the people, she represents an old-school resistance against land sharks and opportunistic men; she’s staged as a baddie but is actually a default feminist — having killed her husband for beating up her gay son, and withstanding Max’s blackmail attempts to ‘redevelop’ her community area. She might be an obstacle in terms of this narrative, but she’s the main character of a parallel biopic that unfolds in broad daylight.

The problem with the series — and unfortunately, there is one — is its formal blandness. It has a dry and functional Hotstar-remake-coded rhythm, in that there is little to no voice beyond the cultural translation. You can tell that things happen because things have already happened in an original show. For instance, Ashu’s arc features a lot of psychological manipulation and gaslighting. But the storytelling doesn’t have fun with this track. He’s supposed to be a master of messing with people’s heads, a trait established in a shaky opening scene where he coaxes a confession out of a murder suspect in a jail cell. Later on, he ‘removes’ a potential troublemaker from his brother’s path by preying on her depression and nudging her towards suicide. He also convinces a rape survivor to take back her complaint by striking up a conversation with her at the bar she works at. There are many more incidents, except Ashu rarely sounds persuasive and skillful enough to pull them off; his line of reasoning is never as slick as the screenplay believes it is. The transformations are too easy, too written. He gets beaten up a lot, so he’s only physically committed to the role. The show isn’t afforded the bandwidth to explore the fact that Ashu became this guy because he was once persuaded to be a cold-blooded killer.

There’s also the implausible equation between Ashu and the cop who overlooks his unhinged behaviour. This DSP (Heeba Shah) wants to be Tom Hanks to Ashu’s Leonardo DiCaprio from Catch Me If You Can (2002), but her protective instincts turn the plot into a convoluted mess. Her affinity for — and predatory use of — Ashu is not explained, other than a passing mention of how she noticed his ‘talents’ in jail. The Goa we get a sense of isn’t shot with a healthy dose of curiosity either; it’s hard to see the place as a character when there aren’t any clever establishing shots, outdoor pieces or visual transitions.

The show also gets too dense in pursuit of narrative scale. A simple tale of a man trying to do a Baazigar on his own bloodline is expanded into a story with multiple faces, motivations and conflicts. The chaos is stretched with the presence of a corrupt MLA, a stilted police boss, Nisha and her doubts, Deshmukh’s gang-war saga (including a rebel right-hand man), Aimee’s ex-boyfriend, Pedro’s paranoia and Shardul’s divorce. A secret CCTV camera in the prison is overused to a point where nothing can be resolved without the police themselves breaking the law and spying on the inmates as if it’s a reality show. Basically there’s too much going on, which distorts the focus from the brothers. When it finally comes down to a confrontation between them, it’s anticlimactic and rushed.

‘Wasted opportunity’ is the obvious conclusion. As is the if-only syndrome. But there’s also the frustration of watching a genuinely complicated character — a bit like R. Madhavan’s in the first season of Breathe (2018) — in a battle with a story that fails to trust him. The makers certainly take a risk, but one can only dream of a production where the darkness isn’t so curated. It’s somehow safe despite the big swings, echoing the mechanical progression of a series like Aarya after a decent start. It ends with the usual implication (and threat) of a next season, but that’s not because Ashu’s ambitions are incomplete or a deadly comeback awaits Max. It’s because Magpie was not a limited series. The source material demands more, so we will get more. The Goan gang can take a hike — but only after an afternoon nap.