'Kerala Crime Files' Season 2 Series Review: Patient Storytelling Becomes Lethargic In This Follow Up Season

A spectrum of khaki-clad moustaches solve murders in Kerala Crime Files, the first Malayalam OTT series, that brought to the attention-deficit streaming landscape, Malayalam cinema’s trademark patience—what many will wrongly and enthusiastically call “slow burn”, but what is actually just a casual stroll through the lives of ordinary people pulled into extraordinary events. Nothing is really burning in this show—slow or otherwise. The story steers so close to rhythms of life, you can mistake it for a slice of sliced life drama. The policeman becomes the perfect hook to hang these stories on—mundane lives in proximity to high-wire stakes.

In the first season, it was the death of a sex worker in a lodge that turns into a messy study of masculine entitlement and disaffection. In the recently-released second season, written by Bahul Ramesh, the writer-cinematographer of Kishkinda Kaanadam (2024), it is a missing police officer, K Ambili Raju (Indrans). 

The season begins with all the police officers of Kaniyarvila, Trivandrum being transferred elsewhere due to suspected links with criminals and goons. Unlike season one, or most crime dramas, where the central crime is expressed in the first five minutes, the show takes its own time. The “precipitating incident” keeps getting teased at, but it is only by the second episode we have a clear map of where the show is heading—and even then, we are hoodwinked constantly, but not in a forceful gesture. This is what investigation looks like—messy, cumbersome, with a vague path that often gets derailed.  

There is a theft of artefacts and paintings at the MV Krishnan Nair Memorial Museum in Kochi, a private museum. Items worth over two crore rupees are slurped off. A dog called to sniff the crime scene goes berserk, and swallows a pin-holder. Ambili is negotiating bail for one of his criminals elsewhere. The police officers being transferred has galvanised local news. At the edge of the story, a smudged dialogue makes it clear that Ambili has gone missing.  

With a station now manned by newbies, like the rookie Noble (Arjun Radhakrishnan) under the new SHO Kurian Avaran (Lal), this search for Ambili snakes off in strange and distant directions. The sub-plot around dogs—Simba (Terry), Jo (Robby) and Honey (Tippu) all credited—keeps promising a larger part in the puzzle, which it gets in the rousing climax, scenes of canine affection, a part so large, it eclipses Ambili altogether. He is forgotten by the story that created him.  

All of the actors embody roles like slipping into shirts—effortlessly, they refuse to become “characters”. We are able to distinguish one from another, but at no point do we have a perfect sense of who they are, which keeps shifting under the shifting sands of the story, with mounting pressure and fresh evidence. Yet more evidence that Malayalam cinema has created a demand for film studies to re-think words like “character” “plot” “structure”. 

The first time we see Ambili, he seems like a pushover, only for his wily wit, his webbed network, and the larger ecosystem of respect he demands and receives being made clear. He is “a walking directory of the city”. The story curries his character with more virtues—street virtues of doing what needs to be done, not state virtues of doing what is legal—and small quirks, like his obsession with lottery tickets, common in Kerala, where you hinge future pleasure on present stakes. As the details of his personal life emerge, his character hardens and softens—we want to know more, but all we have are his bloodstains and flashbacks of people’s memory of him. This desire to want to know more is both the story’s success and failure—that it has created this character that applies pressure on our imagination, but has not given him enough space to push around.

The more urgent question this show brings up is whether such stories, which truly burn in Shahi Kabir’s Ela Veezha Poonchira (2022) or the recently released Ronth, can be stretched into the format of a series where each episode seeds in it the desire to know more—not just about the case, but about the world, too. 

With Kerala Crime Files, this patience begins to feel like lethargy, because the makers of the show seem to have fundamentally mistaken what makes this pathway (patience) into this genre (police procedural) so rewarding. It is not the details of the case—which multiply with every episode—but that of the lives lived around it—which deplete with every episode—and by constantly twisting, turning, and adding details to the case, Kerala Crime Files bloats itself. They stretch the procedural so long, that by the fourth episode, they need agitated violins and quick-tap music to remind us of what is truly at stake. We forget. 

In the final episode, introduced to a new character, a new arc, and a new purpose that cuts through the flab of the preceding five episodes in a rousing speech, the story destabilises itself. There is no feeling of culmination, but one of accidental discovery. The thin-ness of it all makes the show float away. 

What also works to the detriment of the show is this metallic wash that makes the sunlight falling on Trivandrum indistinguishable from an afternoon in Mumbai, or elsewhere. This flattening of place, turns language into a mere formality—place is not something that is inhabited, but an aesthetic that can be switched around. The image is so cold, when a blue car becomes a central intrigue, the blue metal of that car gleams oddly as though it is lit from within. I could not tell you if it was summer or winter, afternoon or evening. The cities keep shifting, and timelines plod along, with top shots and text on screen forcing us to believe we are in new places. But world building, afterall, is not just on the page, but in the image, too. Who will build that world?