‘Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein’ Season 2 Review: When Pulp-Fiction Grows A Heart

Director: Sidharth Sengupta
Writers: Sidharth Sengupta, Umesh Padalkar, Varun Badola
Cast: Tahir Raj Bhasin, Anchal Singh, Shweta Tripathi Sharma, Saurabh Shukla, Arunoday Singh, Gurmeet Chaudhary
Streaming on: Netflix
Language: Hindi

Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein (2022) gave a new spin to the “has it aged well?” debate. It reimagined a ‘problematic’ pop-cultural phenomenon — in this case, Shah Rukh Khan’s 1990s anti-hero persona — through a modern lens. But instead of upgrading the template and going woke, the wickedly clever series staged the masculinity of those movies as a Shakespearean tragicomedy. The expectation (who men think they are) and reality (who they actually are) panels collided. The slickness of a Bollywood plot faded away. What remained was the tale of a loser who kept failing to kill the woman he’s forced to marry; think Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa’s Sunil stuck in Baazigar. This ‘Vicky’ is driven by foolish idealism, not lofty themes like revenge. The man just cannot get the job done. Even the hitman he hires goes rogue. Everything goes wrong. You simply felt sorry for him.

In theory, Season 2 of Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein progresses the way it should. Vikrant (Tahir Raj Bhasin) clumsily transforms from prey to predator. He kills to cover his tracks. The famous body-in-suitcase scene from Baazigar becomes a body-parts-in-wedding-hamper scene here. Unrequited lover Inspector Karan Saxena is a sadboi commando named Guru (Gurmeet Chaudhary) here. When Guru becomes suspicious, Vikrant reacts and taunts him as if he were taking notes from the 1993 thriller. Vikrant lies and pretends, playing the role of a hapless husband desperate to get his abducted wife Purva (Anchal Singh) back. He chases a future with Shikha (Shweta Tripathi Sharma), his former girlfriend, even after she’s married. His obsession loses shape — it’s hard to tell his enduring love for Shikha from his enduring hatred for Purva. He is no longer the small-town engineer with modest dreams.

Vikrant’s journey is entertaining to watch, of course, because he continues to fumble his way out of sticky situations. He isn’t very good at breaking bad. At one point, he instructs Shikha’s parents to hide abroad, only to be informed that they don’t have a passport. The practicalities of living thwart his mastermind era. The walls keep closing in and sweaters get greyer; once his sister and father discover his intentions, he ‘performs’ for an audience. The false notes — like best friend Golden’s cringey comic scenes, or an overpopulated finale — barely distract from this core. The poker-faced series is laced with a mix of self-seriousness and dark humour. The writing chuckles at the inbuilt violence of language. For instance, a boss mumbles “kahaan marr gaya hai?” (“where has he gone to die?”) about a missing character, oblivious to the fact that he’s really dead. Vikrant is casually warned that “if you weren’t my son-in-law, I’d chop off your head and throw it in the water” on the banks of the very river in which he deposits a severed head hours ago.

But the masterstroke of Season 2 is its daring shift of perspective. There are clues in the new title sequence: Purva’s face is the centerpiece, and the male-oriented song has a more neutral vocal timbre. The first episode, in fact, opens with a childhood flashback that instantly humanises her. It suggests that we’ve only seen her as a sheltered sociopath through the eyes of Vikrant, a man who’s hell-bent on convincing us that she’s ‘cray-cray’. Now she becomes the nucleus. But is she the prey by virtue of not being the predator? This season forces us to see Purva as just another needy partner, and consequently, to see Vikrant through the eyes of the other side. She spends much of this season as a vulnerable subject of a kidnapping that keeps going awry, and her longing for Vikrant persists; a backstory provides context about why she is the way she is. In short, Purva gets the male anti-hero treatment — with a comeback arc and a shootout — which in turn excavates our relationship with the toxicity of this trope. It says something that the ‘purity’ of Purva’s love is suddenly measured by her ability to survive, suffer and be violent. Anchal Singh is eerily effective as the woman who turns the tables on our gaze. You feel sorry for her, but she exudes the kind of charisma and agency that her husband never had.

Ironically, this strips Vikrant of his genre identity and exposes him as an unlikable fellow: the auraless version of the on-screen men we idolise. You start to notice the inherent delusions of people like him. They gaslight the audience as well as themselves, using class rage and eat-the-rich ambitions as a crutch to justify their own persecution complex. Vikrant’s bitter voiceover always refers to Purva’s powerful family as “inn logon (these people),” implying that he is the poor sufferer and she is solely responsible for the consequences of his actions. Every time he hesitates, his middle-class conscience is self-serving, and has little to do with his feelings for those around him. He claims to protect his family and Shikha, but all he’s really doing is seeking a medium for his cold-blooded instincts. His moral flexibility is rooted in the fact that he’s a man. His female counterparts — movie characters (like Madhuri Dixit in Koyla) who’ve been plucked out of obscurity and married into rich families — elope and escape. But Vikrant would rather elope within the confines of society; he tries to manipulate himself into becoming a widower so that his future is more “acceptable”. Tahir Raj Bhasin nails this transition from mediocre anti-hero to subjective villain. His body is almost reptilian in how it weaponises Vikrant’s self-pity.

The triumph of this season is that its narrative is rigged against him. It reminds Vikrant that he is merely in a dysfunctional marriage. This is his love story; he just doesn’t know it. The presence of more compatible partners for both the women — the macho Guru for Purva; a sweet husband for Shikha — cements the against-all-odds undercurrents. Purva and Vikrant are twisted soulmates, but this is not a revelation that emerges for effect. The writing zooms out this time, framing the couple as broken cogs in a systemic wheel of generational trauma. The season is bookended by moments in Britain and Poland, which imply that Purva might be a product of circumstances and familial conflict. Vikrant is the product of a relatable illness — this is his rebellion against a family who ‘sold’ his soul like a commodity. It’s this shared sense of victimhood that binds them together; they are united by damage. There’s a Haseen Dillruba (2021) vibe about how Vikrant is unwittingly testing their marriage under the guise of escaping it. I like that the hitman (Arunoday Singh) is also a victim masquerading as a killer. His anger is more genuine. His masculinity is dismantled like Vikrant’s, until they’re two sides of the same coin.

These heavy themes don’t jump out of the frames. They become more of a bonus, bleeding into the viewer’s experience rather than hijacking it. Director Sidharth Sengupta deserves credit for turning a potentially insular, loud and meta-textual series into such an accessible one. Even if you take out the cultural commentary and winks, the craft keeps it interesting. In that sense, it’s one of the better Netflix productions in terms of the cohesion between scale and guile. The action pieces are good-looking without being hyper-stylised; the semi-fictional settings are picturesque without being exotic. The use of music is expressive, too. A track called ‘Deewana Deewana’ — a nod to Shah Rukh Khan’s debut as the honourable second husband in Deewana (1992) — scores the wedding performance of Shikha’s honourable husband, while ex-flame Vikrant dismembers a body and mourns the death of his former self. The six-episode season ends on multiple cliffhangers, but despite the shroud of uncertainty surrounding the characters, the climax strikes a chord. It widens the scope. A lot more than a third season is inevitable. It’s like watching a star-crossed romance that’s yet to recognise its own reflection in the mirror. The more you think about it, the blurrier the lines become between a happily ever after and a happily never after. If that isn’t a catchphrase for modern companionship, I don’t know what is.