Cast: Shriya Pilgaonkar, Kamya Ahlawat, Ragini Dwivedi, Tuhina Das, Yahhve Sharma
Director: Ajay Bhuyan
Platform: On Zee5 from June 6
Rating out 5: ★
Chhal Kapat opens with such urgency that it feels like you’ve been thrown into a pool of cold water. But not in a good way. It doesn’t begin so much as rudely barge in. There’s no atmosphere, no anticipation, no soft hand on the shoulder to guide you into the series. Just the blunt, graceless wallop of plot.
The premise, if you can call it that, involves the murder of an influencer, a word now less associated with influence than with a kind of pointless digital self-harm, at a wedding in Burhanpur. That’s the set-up. A destination wedding, drenched in artificial lighting and dialogue that sounds like it was copied from a broken teleprompter, tries to host a murder mystery while struggling to find the mystery, the murder, or any real reason for you to care.
Now, I am entirely in favour of genre, when genre knows its place. A good whodunnit doesn’t need to pretend it’s The Seventh Seal. But Chhal Kapat doesn’t want to be a good whodunnit. It wants to be a psychological thriller, a prestige crime drama, a shadowy feminist procedural, all encased in the twitchy shell of a daily soap opera having a nervous breakdown. It wants to be everything, which is another way of saying it’s absolutely nothing.
Shriya Pilgaonkar, who plays SP Devika Rathore, is cast as the show’s grim centre. She’s supposed to be serious, complicated, damaged. What she is, really, is flat. A kind of narrative sinkhole. She walks through rooms as if she’s reading stage directions in her head. She delivers lines like she’s describing a PowerPoint slide – flat, mechanical, over-rehearsed. None of this is really her fault. She’s clearly been directed with no grace or subtlety.
The music is, frankly, insane. There’s no other word for it. It doesn’t accompany scenes, it holds them hostage. It wails and bangs and rises in the middle of sentences like it’s been badly edited in by an intern whose only reference point was Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi. Every zoom-in, every eye twitch, every dull line gets the sonic treatment of a war crime tribunal. It’s hysterical. Not in the funny way. In the “make it stop” way.
The characters are less characters than human-shaped plot contraptions. They arrive, they sneer or tremble, they announce something expository and leave. There’s the jealous husband, the wild-eyed sister, the nervous bride, and so on, all performing their roles with the tepid energy of people waiting for an Uber. These aren’t people, they’re bullet points. No arcs, no motivations, just hairstyles and cue cards.
The dialogue is a festival of clichés without even the decency to be amusing. It’s not written so much as assembled. Bits of old drama, bits of failed noir, bits of melodrama stapled together like a ransom note cut from bad soaps.
There’s an attempt at emotional depth. A subplot involving Devika’s experience with domestic abuse drifts in and out like a subplot from another show. It’s raised not to explore, but to decorate. It’s a sob story stuck on like a badge of seriousness, then promptly forgotten.
And as for the murder mystery, the thing that’s meant to hold this whole tottering mess together, it’s thinner than a hotel bedsheet. There’s no tension. No stakes. Just a long list of possible suspects who seem to be competing for a prize in dramatic overacting. The final reveal is both painfully predictable and somehow still underwhelming, like watching someone cheat at Cluedo and still get the answer wrong.
What’s most galling about Chhal Kapat is not that it’s bad. Mediocrity is forgivable. Even failure, if it’s interesting. But this is a show that pretends. That wants desperately to be serious, grown-up television. It slathers on the darkness, the slow pans, the backstories, the symbolism, all to mask the fact that it has the soul of a B-grade afternoon serial. It’s all disguise.
Burhanpur, the location, should be the one saving grace. A town of old walls, quiet rivers, and whispered history. And yet here it looks like a wedding venue at an IT park. It’s all wasted. You never feel the weight of place. Just drone shots, half-hearted colour grading, and corridors that look like they were rented by the hour.
There’s a word for this sort of thing. Pretentious. But even that feels too generous. Chhal Kapat isn’t pretending to be art. It’s pretending to be a show that knows what it’s doing. And it doesn’t. It’s like a magician who’s forgotten how the trick works and is now just holding a dead rabbit.
And then, as if to underline the whole mess, out of nowhere a song breaks in halfway through—singing, “Launda thora off beat hai.” Translation: the guy’s a little out of rhythm. If ever there was an accidental anthem for the show itself, this is it. Chhal Kapat is wildly, embarrassingly off beat, not in a quirky or clever way, but in the clumsy, disjointed, can’t-find-the-beat way that leaves you wondering if anyone behind the scenes actually noticed.
If the show had rhythm, it would be marching somewhere. Instead, it stumbles aimlessly, out of sync, and very much off key. A final, unintentional confession that Chhal Kapat doesn’t just fail to hit the mark, it can’t even find it.
