‘Killer Soup’ series review: Manoj Bajpayee and Konkona Sensharma are good fun in safe caper

Manoj Bajpayee, Konkona Sensharma in ‘Killer Soup’

Konkona Sensharma made a bewitching Emilia in Omkara (2006), Vishal Bhardwaj’s earthy and iconic take on Othello. It comes as no surprise that Abhishek Chaubey, who was an assistant director on that film, has re-engaged Sensharma’s talents on Killer Soup. A fine dramatic actor, Sensharma excels at material that twists and bends: 2021’s Geeli Pucchi, in the anthology Ajeeb Daastaans, coasted on her adept slipperiness as a performer. Sensharma’s eyes go wide in mock or genuine alarm; equally, she can soothe and entreat with deceptive calm. She makes a meal out of these roles, playing seemingly ordinary pawns who end up rearranging the board.

Take her latest creation, Swathi Shetty. She is a homemaker and a chef, but a terrible one, serving the same bland paya soup each day to her husband Prabhu (Manoj Bajpayee). They live in a fictional southern hill town, where Prabhu runs a floundering real estate company. Swathi hopes to start her own restaurant, a dream inconceivable to her husband but politely encouraged by her secret lover Umesh (also Bajpayee). Umesh is a squint-eyed masseur with gambling debts. He is kind to Swathi, but Prabhu is richer. When asked by Umesh, “Do you love me?”, Swathi takes a long and delicious pause, hedging her bets.

Crisis erupts when the lovers are caught out one night by Prabhu. The doddering boor winds up dead, and Swathi — recognising how closely Umesh resembles her husband — conjures a plan. Killer Soup (written by Chaubey, Anaiza Merchant, Anant Tripathi and Harshad Nalawade) references a real incident from 2017, when a woman in Hyderabad tried passing off her paramour as her late spouse. In an interview with The Hindu, Chaubey conceded it was a “stupid crime”, hardly sufficient to sustain an eight-episode series. Thus, we get a tangle of ancillary plots and characters. Prabhu, it is revealed, was conning his thuggish elder brother (Sayaji Shinde); they were, as adult siblings sometimes tend to be, financially entangled to an alarming degree.

Directing his first series, Chaubey indulges his lust for whimsical detail. Swathi attends clandestine cooking classes under the alias of Manisha Koirala; Rahman and Robert Frost assist in breakthroughs; Shakespeare peeks out of every corner and kitchen blind. Yet, after a while, the fun runs dry. Killer Soup has texture and flavour, but it lacks consistency. The secrets and disharmonies of the Shetty family are only moderately engaging. One interesting track involves Prabhu’s niece, Appu (a memorable Anula Navleker), yearning to go abroad. She wants to make charcoals at the École des Beaux-Arts, but is stuck overseeing accounts for her dad.

Since Prabhu checks out quite early on, Bajpayee doesn’t get to have enough fun with his first double role. The primary challenge, for him, is to play Umesh playing Prabhu — neither character is defined to a degree that we marvel at the switch-up. The show establishes its rules loosely, admitting the gaps in its conceit before ignoring them entirely. Sensharma carries things until the final act, where they spin out of her grasp. This is a mediocre show with an exceptional cast: M Nasser is poignant as a retiring cop, and Shinde — Manoj’s co-star from Shool (1999) — is as riotous as ever.

Choice ingredients, however, do not a wholesome broth make. For factors that are beyond its control, Killer Soup is a dispiriting start to the streaming year. Platforms like Netflix and Prime Video have made it abundantly clear what sort of bets they are willing to place in India. Massive, politically-engaged shows are a thing of the past. What is left in their absence are safe, quirky crime dramas. Abhishek Chaubey made two of the most thrilling films of the past decade,Udta Punjab (2016) and Sonchiriya (2019). Like serpents, they came hissing and snapping at us. That streaming would, one day, remove his sting is not a future anyone envisioned or hoped for.

Killer Soup is currently streaming on Netflix