‘Mandala Murders’ Series Review: In Vaani Kapoor's Mytho-Thriller, Ambition is Defeated by Accessibility

Like Khauf, Black White & Grey — Love Kills, and Black Warrant earlier this year, Mandala Murders is the kind of Hindi fiction that wouldn’t exist if not for streaming platforms. It isn’t short of ambition or scale; it’s original; it’s conceived with the rules, reach, world-building and timelines of a fantasy novel. The template of two haunted cops investigating a pattern of ritualistic murders in a mysterious town becomes a generational saga of a secret female-led cult, black magic, the fusion of science and divinity, a machine that ingests human thumbs to grant miracles, comatose girlfriends, shadow worshippers, a political rivalry, a ninja-styled and mythical killer, a Frankenstein’s-Monster-coded mission, and a lot more. In fact, 8 episodes later, I’d be hard-pressed to distil the premise into a coherent logline. When one character tells another late in the show that “the answers you seek are beyond your understanding,” I could only nod in vehement agreement. To be fair, it does this without making us feel thick.

The setting is a Bihar-but-Varanasi-coded place named Charandaspur. Vikram Singh (Vaibhav Raj Gupta), a sullen and suspended Delhi cop, accompanies his father to their ancestral home. They have history here: Vikram’s mother disappeared years ago during a tragedy. But he believes she’s alive. Some more history: he shares sexual tension with Ananya (Surveen Chawla), the sister of his comatose fiancée, and the power-hungry wife of a politician. Vikram’s arrival coincides with a spate of gruesome murders. A torsoless body of a photographer (hands and legs stitched to his head) is found, and he starts to dig around. Except he’s not the only protagonist. Enter CIB officer Rea Thomas (Vaani Kapoor), also haunted and desperate to be back in the field. As the outsider, she joins insider Vikram to decode the sequence of future deaths — the scriptures (I can’t explain even if I tried) of an eerie cult called Yast predict that “a voyeur’s torso” will be followed by the severing of hands (“the arms of demon brothers”), a face (“a princess’ face”), a head (“a shaunak’s head”), feet (“feet of a servant’s son”), a heart (“a child’s heart”) and blood (“the blood of a miracle son”). They thus deduce that someone — or some gang — is trying to stitch together a perfect body.

A still from 'Mandala Murders'

Each episode begins with a flashback of the potential victim. The murders themselves reveal the hidden relationships, heritage and moralities of people — sometimes the cops guess wrong; the suspense is in their identities — like a Final Destination movie where ‘fate’ plays the role of a screenplay. While all of this is impressive in spirit, unlike the shows mentioned in the first line, Mandala Murders makes a crucial mistake. It seems to be aware of how niche — and difficult to process — its story is, so the storytelling tries too hard to be accessible. It’s an example of indie (read: creative) vision being offset by mainstream treatment; or a director’s idealism being offset by a producer’s functionality. Only, one keeps working against the other.

Mandala Murders suffers from several micro-issues. For starters, big-city detectives Rea and Vikram too easily accept the mythology of the town as pure fact — it goes against the DNA of their jobs. It’s not that there’s a mountain of cosmic proof; they immediately let the superstitions and lore dictate their investigation. I suppose this reflects a larger malaise of the post-truth times we live in; they’re almost scared to question the legitimacy of the town’s beliefs. There’s also the needless angle of warring political parties and how they use the killings to their advantage — I get that it’s a front for a twist, but it distracts from the central tug between modernity and the conceits of tradition. Even as a fictional character, Vikram is given too much trauma to handle — loss of family, soulmates, friends, sanity. The sight of him in shock becomes a recurring theme. But his quest to uncover the past is rarely visible; his motives get lost in the blur of who-next cliffhangers. His exchanges with Ananya, in particular, sound like two people narrating their life to each other for the audience’s sake: “remember when we first met?” — “you met me 4 years before I met Kavita; your father was a ruling party politician and…” You don’t say.

The irony of manufacturing such an elaborate storyline only for the characters to spell out their character sketches never ceases to amaze me. The last time the word “vardaan (miracle)” irritated me this much was in the first season of Taaza Khabar. Two senior performers play men who repeat every line in two languages, like they’re subtitling their own emotions. The writing reverse-engineers the identity of most players; it’s like watching a Dan Brown book grapple with a K-drama aesthetic. This eventually creates a sense of distrust in the viewer. Every other scene, a character is revealed to be a descendant of someone involved in a 1950s legend. Every other moment is traced back to a period that may or may not keep us clueless until the final episode. Of the performances, only Shriya Pilgaonkar nails her extended cameo — in the first and last episode — as the leader of the ambiguous cult. In her portrayal of Rea, Vaani Kapoor mistakes strength for opacity. The rest of the cast (including Surveen Chawla, who’s otherwise having a good year) is reduced to functional talking heads; not even a brief Gullak reunion (of Gupta and Jameel Khan) can rescue the verbosity of the series.

The chaos of form in Mandala Murders turns it into a drag, which is a pity, because it’s so interesting in theory. The literature it creates lends credence to the opinion that storytellers today are forced to be more innovative in an age of intolerance and censorship. You can tell that the makers have taken a limitation — the need to not offend any religion or culture — and transformed it into a strength of parallels and possibilities. The link between sorcery and science, between the mystical and the real, is explored with some conviction. The backstory of a physicist grabbing a religious cult’s land to build a nuclear plant pits the linearity of development against the non-linearity of faith. One ‘side’ defeating the other is a progressive message that movies can’t directly deliver anymore; this is after all an era in which mythology is often rebranded as history. A women-shaped doctrine seeking revenge — against a male-dominated society — in the guise of empowerment and evolution is an exciting concept, too.

I just wish the series trusted its own genre-bending nature. There is no room for the ideas — and the idealism — to breathe. All the imagination gets tangled in a web of exposition dumps, stylised flashbacks and loud staging. The density of information makes it difficult to invest in the characters. Consequently, the stakes are heightened by the volume of the craft rather than its voice: the score, words, over-filmed images and red herrings. The darkness of the psychology does not

translate into something more poignant. It remains distant, like an academic paper aiming to impress, not art hoping to express. As a result, Mandala Murders gets hard to watch after the first few episodes — a curious case of ambition going through an existential crisis. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a talented guy who lowers his intellect around his friends only to realise that he’s lost the ability to be sharp and dreamy.