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'Suzhal' Season 2 Series Review: A Stillborn Follow-Up to a Promising First Season
Written and created by Pushkar and Gayatri, and directed by Bramma and Sarjun KM, the second season of 'Suzhal' does not have the initial bite or promise of the first — which itself nosedived once it strayed away from the supernatural
Creators: Pushkar and Gayatri
Directors: Bramma and Sarjun KM
Writers: Pushkar and Gayatri
Cast: Kathir, Aishwarya Rajesh, Lal, Gouri Kishan
Language: Tamil
Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video
The second season of Suzhal begins in the court, where what is being discussed is the difference between “sattam” or law and “nyaayam” or justice. Law is what gets congealed in the books. Justice is what these books are trying to achieve. Nandini (Aishwarya Rajesh) is caught in the gap between the two — and there she will stay until the very end of this season, her narrative arc flattened into a highway. Previously, she killed the murderer of her sister, also the man who sexually abused her. Now, she is on trial. Chellappa (Lal) is fighting her case, arguing self defence. He is a man of morals, beloved by the community.
Later in the episode, he is found dead in his cottage — because of what use are deeply moral, widely loved characters in stories except to dangle them as bait and then, slash them dead? (Think Ishwak Singh’s character, queer, Muslim, drenched in sincerity and hope, in Paatal Lok.)
All the doors to the cottage are latched shut — so it is initially assumed to be a suicide. But there are gunshot wounds, with no gun in sight — so it is surmised to be a murder. Sub Inspector Sakkarai (Kathir), for whom Chellappa was a father-figure, and who has a soft spot for Nandini from their childhood days, is heading the investigation. Like the first season — set in the hill town of Sambanoor during the Mayana Kollai festival — this season takes place against the Ashtakali festival in Kalipattinam, a seaside town.
In the first season, though, the festival seeps into the veins of the story, and for a while we are left unsettled if the answers that the story demands — regarding kidnapping, murder, and arson — are rooted in human experiences or in supernatural phenomena. The first season’s expertly staged initial episodes keep muddying these genre distinctions. In this season, though, firmly plonked in the corporeal world, the festival serves as a filler, to pulsate the lethargy of the story with exaggerated gestures and grotesque imagery. You could have a “Skip Ashtakali” button, and the story is untouched, because this B-roll is shot without any presence, joy, community, or horror. At best, the festival offers a kinetic, crowded backdrop against which events unfold.
Chellappa’s murder does not help resuscitate the stillborn sophomore season, nor does the investigation by Sakkarai and Moorthy (Saravanan) — who might or not have vested interests in the outcome — because the characters are so meekly etched, pitched, and performed either in one tone — like Saravanan and Nandini, both moping and intense — or keep flipping moral shades like they do not want to be pinned down, their absence is felt as a logistical erasure, their presence is felt like a logistical pressure, not a narrative and certainly not an emotional one. When one murder suspect is not enough to buoy the story, seven more women are brought in. In the third episode, these seven women enter different police stations to confess, and now, together, there are eight suspects — this scene plays out to the Ashtakali, or the eight kalis, virtue being imposed on these slight frames before we even get to know who they are.
A show that sees bodies as biographies and not people, keeps throwing characters in to see if wider-not-deeper might work as a narrative ploy to stretch a story like tent skin. When that doesn’t work, it twists the moral clarity we have towards characters — is Chellappa really all that he is made out to be? This ants in the pants quality of the show smudges any possibility of simmering — the one thing the show promised, against all the other murder mystery stories being offered on streaming, of which there is much.
We get flashbacks — and as every lazy storyteller who uses this lazy device, it is entirely expository, entirely because the storyteller does not know how to show the past in the present, and instead, must quickly, efficiently, recede into these scenes from the past. An entire episode is dedicated to this weak, overloaded appendage.
Written and created by Pushkar and Gayatri, and directed by Bramma and Sarjun KM, this season does not have the initial bite or promise of the first — which itself nosedived once it strayed away from the supernatural. The Aravanis make sketchy appearances as sidekicks and cameos, and there is a lesbian angle that gets uncomfortably thrown in — through violence — then explained, and then forgotten.
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Shot by Abraham Joseph, the same scene, canned from multiple angles, sometimes yields such different qualities of light, the sharp angular positions, and the clean profiles, cut with silhouettes here and there, that it makes one scene feel like many scenes — the perils of the multi-camera set-up. Joseph ravishes his attention on looping staircases, and frames bodies against the hot, steaming sea, but where the show needs him — to bring the festival into the lifeblood of the story by leaking its moods — the image falls short, perhaps, because the writing falls short, for what can an image do for a story that refuses to be anything but glut?