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‘Manvat Murders’ Review: A Bland Retelling of a Brutal True-crime Chapter
In creating its own version of justice and resolution, the series trivialises the anatomy of the crimes.
Director: Ashish Avinash Bende
Writer: Girish Jayant Joshi
Cast: Ashutosh Gowariker, Sonali Kulkarni, Sai Tamhankar, Makarand Anaspure, Shardul Saraf, Mayur Khandge
Streaming on: Sony LIV
Language: Marathi
Being a true-crime drama in the Indian streaming landscape is like being an aspiring batsman in India’s cramped bylanes and crowded fields. Everybody is one — and everybody is advised to be one. Consequently, it’s harder to stand out. The default level has to be high: an engrossing story, a solid cast, a sense of place and time, technical competence. Most shows opt for an atmospheric setting to conceal a convoluted plot; the logic is that a visually striking tone will compensate for pacing and structural issues. In other words, the style can distract from a lack of substance. But Manvat Murders, helmed by Aatmapamphlet (2023) director Ashish Avinash Bende, is a Marathi-language series that does the reverse.
At first, it feels like the substance of this widely chronicled horror story is its style. The eight-episode police procedural is based on a series of gruesome occult slayings in rural Maharashtra in the early 1970s. It stars filmmaker Ashutosh Gowariker as investigating officer Ramakant Kulkarni, the real-life supercop whose memoir (Footprints on the Sand of Crime, published in 2004) this show is adapted from. Kulkarni is the urban outsider who arrives in Manwat, a small Maharashtrian town replete with superstition, corruption, marginalised living and caste prejudice. The show is almost anti-atmospheric — a simplistic play-like production value, the protagonist’s total absence of personality, a bland colour palette, awkward transitions (for example, a shot of flies buzzing over a dead goat cuts to Kulkarni swatting away a mosquito during a lecture), and cosplay-level suspense. There is zero pretense. You almost find this refreshing — like a sober antidote to the 70s-set narratives that often imitate the pulpy cinematic period and its pop-cultural themes. It’s as if the filmmaking says: this is the unglamorous reality of the decade that inspired all those Bollywood blockbusters. Perhaps it needs no cosmetic surgery because it trusts the authenticity of its body.
But it takes only a few episodes for this illusion to dissolve. It soon emerges that the craft isn’t deliberately dated. There is no deeper meaning behind the stagey artificiality of scenes. The vanilla dialogue isn’t a part of some grand plan. The flashbacks of the killings aren’t lazy on purpose. The lack of ornateness isn’t methodical: Gowariker’s performance is genuinely inert, and the cliffhangers (a door opens and a man gasps) are straight out of ‘90s’ soap operas. If not for a character’s lousy wig and his revolver holster, it’d have been impossible to tell that the year is 1973. That’s just how Manvat Murders has been made. It takes a while to realise that the batting is naturally dull.
It’s a pity, because there’s so much historical context. The show focuses on the Kulkarni-led investigation, not the failed court case or the acquittal of the suspects that followed. It never feels like an open-and-shut case, unfurling as a reminder of a law enforcement system that is yet to encounter the crutches of technology. I like that mistakes are made and there is no rhythm to events; Kulkarni seldom lives up to his reputation as a supersleuth. This is no whodunit either. It’s clear, early on, that the ritualistic crimes have something to do with a powerful couple — a Pardhi woman named Rukhmini (Sonali Kulkarni) and her upper-caste lover, Uttamrao (Makarand Anaspure) — who run an illegal liquor racket through Rukhmini’s sister, Samindri (Sai Tamhankar). Rukhmini’s infertility, the couple’s hold over the village, a few shady shamans, blood sacrifices, and some red herrings (including a paedophile and an Amitabh Bachchan fanatic) feature in a story that makes no secret about who is behind the ghastly murders. It’s mostly about the ‘why’ — it’s about the evidence that Kulkarni struggles to uncover with an understaffed setup in an unfamiliar environment.
But his journey brings to mind the upper-caste-saviour politics of a film like Article 15 (2019), where the protagonist operates on inherited wisdom and vibes alone. The intent is to show that Kulkarni is an empathetic officer, but the preachy hero syndrome is embedded in the man’s irritatingly calm demeanour. The privilege is rooted in the sound of his voice. For instance, when he is asked why he doesn’t travel in the first-class compartment of a train, he sagely remarks he likes “observing” common people. It goes without saying that the show ends with a moral-of-the-story monologue that blames the system. If you look closely, you might even see the halo above his head.
The lack of texture and detailing slowly add up. The stilted reaction shots (where characters visibly act for individual shots rather than broader scenes) are hard to ignore; the background score keeps searching for excuses to reach a crescendo; the faded walls and prisons look curated. Kulkarni’s subordinates are reduced to stereotypes: good cop, bad cop, studious cop, bumbling cop, and so on. There’s also a massive dissonance between the gravity of a crime and its physical aftermath. For example, at least three of the victims are minors, but the emotional magnitude is never apparent from the way the policemen and locals go about life. Rapes and beheadings are mentioned, but they sound like dry information instead of monstrous acts. The actual gore, too, is staged like an afterthought.
In creating its own version of justice and resolution, the series trivialises the anatomy of the crimes. There is no happily ever after, but Manvat Murders makes one up. The show is so preoccupied with its detective drama that it misses the inherent humanity of the tragedy. The caste angle is barely explored beyond the first exposition dump; all the side characters in Manwat are put under the master category of “poor”. Ironically, Kulkarni is an expert at criminal psychology: he has a way of sweet-talking suspects into aiding him. But he comes across as self-righteous, not smart; there is no guile to his methods. The problem is that he looks so serene even when he’s angry and troubled that the dishevelled police apparatus — and all the systemic conflicts — hardly make a dent.
The same could be said about the sanitised manner of Manvat Murders in general. Even when the show appears to be haunted by its bleakness, it is haunted by Casper the Friendly Ghost. You can see the strings and hear the message. You can hear the director’s instructions to the makeup department. You can sense everything except the social temperature of the world. Children and women are slaughtered, but the series is fine with it as long as we know why. Everybody is culpable, because everybody is advised to be culpable.