Snakes & Ladders review: Karthik Subbaraj-backed Tamil dark comedy series on teen friendships & adult deceit is humourless

Tamil dark thriller 'Snakes and Ladders' is now streaming on Prime Video.

For a certain generation that grew up on a regular dose of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Secret Seven books, a series with children in the middle of an adventure was long time coming, albeit on the screen. Now, for a Tamil-illiterate Bengali-speaking reviewer, the only example worth merit and mention from her past is Satyajit Ray’s detective Feluda series. Bengali literature is replete with children’s literature. For Tamil audiences, such a series, which dropped on Prime Video today, might be a first ever, at least as an OTT series. But, in genre-bender Tamil director Karthik Subbaraj’s curation, the children land into a misadventure, one that slithers and coils, entangles and drags them in its wake. Unlike the fun, excitement, and innocence of the Famous Five, or the thrill and laughs of Subbaraj’s own Jigarthanda outings, Snakes and Ladders only has dark twists.

The series, despite solid work by its cast, both young and old, takes itself too seriously. Here is not a children’s series but a series for adults (all right, for children above 16 years of age as the disclaimer goes) with child actors at its helm. These teenagers, while mostly retaining childlike qualities, are made to behave as adults. If they wanted to make another adult mystery thriller, why use children as bait? Give us some pure children’s content devoid of adult troubleshooters. The attempt, here, feels less Famous Five and more Stranger Things-meets-Sacred Games.

Agreed, Snakes and Ladders is a children’s board game that is played by adults with equal excitement. The plot revolves around five close friends — Gilbert aka Gilli, Bala, Santosh aka Sandy, Iraiyan aka Irai, and Raagitha aka Raagi. Their innocent pranks and mischief turn dark as thugs arrive in their hill town.

Set in the mid-2000s, in the fictional hill town of the Ooty-like Rettamugadu, the Tamil series, spread over nine episodes, directed by three men, Bharath Muralidharan, Ashok Veerappan and Kamala Alchemis, in their debut directorial venture, weaves a part-tight, part-loose yarn of a web of deceit, guilt, friendships being tested and faltering moral compasses. You know the series is written by men because the weaklings and victims are either women, or those with a medical condition.

The camera pans in the darkness — it’s all black and blue — as two robbers, Blade and Paari, after an act of heist in a jewellery museum breaks into a house marked with a cross. In the house lives a teacher with her daughter Raagi aka Raagitha (poignantly essayed by Sasha Bharen) who has a medical condition — a blood-clotting disorder. This Blade runner, who’s on the hunt for gold, has asthma. It’s deviously funny. But he is on a mission, punctuated by his inhaler pumpings. He bangs this woman’s head against the wall, motive unclear even after the series ends (of course, there’ll be a Season 2!). Next, one of the two robbers jumps over the boundary wall into a retired military officer’s house. He hides in a kitchen cabinet, as a disgruntled grandson of the house Gilly aka Gilbert (MS Samrith) sniffs the mischief and unwittingly locks the cabinet with a fork. The flame of the poor robber’s life is put out thanks to asphyxiation. This robber who is erased from the series was an interesting character and would have added much dark humour to the story.

The boy, without any design, all of a sudden, has blood on his hands. He needs his friends to dispose off the body. But where to? Easy peasy, in the backyard, a big garden. Rather than reporting the incident to the Police — S Surya Ragaveshwar’s Irai’s father is Sub Inspector Chezian (Nandaa Dorairaj), and when S Surya Kumar’s Sandy’s father (played by legendary director Bharathiraja’s actor-son Manoj Bharathiraja) approaches the police, his estranged son has a plan for him. In tow is Tarun Yuvraaj’s Bala is dependable. The friends — led by a guilt-ridden Gilli (who makes poor choices, having grown up pampered, his parents are absent) — decide to cover up the ill-thought-out act. But can they really? These friends are infamous in their school for pulping a senior boy. The kids are all right, leave them alone. The thrill of a youthful adventure is marred by a looming sense of danger, brought on by an adult world and adult gaze of the writers and directors of the show, thereby deflating their own ingenuity.

Cut to a funeral scene. A gangster has lost his father. The setting is a parody of The Godfather, when Don Corleone dies and Michael is heir-apparent. The Michael here is jaw-knuckling Rico (Muthu Kumar). He would be the only character who would retain the series’s blink-and-miss comic moments. The downward spiral in writing begins after the third or fourth episode.

Too many cooks, usually, spoil the broth. This Tamil dark comedy series, created by Kamala Alchemis and Dhivakar Kamal and produced by Kalyan Subramanian under Karthik Subbaraj’s banner A Stone Bench Production, could have been a rare piece of work, with more hits than misses, but the punches it lands breaks the ribs instead of tickling it. While Snakes and Ladders, on the whole, seems like one series, thanks to the kids, the writing is in a slippery slope when the altercations between the adults take centre stage. The adults are cardboard cutout characters: a fatso likable gangster, a unidimensional chiselled but desultory police officer and an equally chiselled conman and shady IT professional, Naveen Chandra (who himself plays the cop elsewhere: Inspector Rishi; Eleven), who hopes he’ll keep you at the edge of the seat. Due credit should be given to the three directors in sticking to the script because the ask was tall, not easy at all, but the flourishes of each (and the lack thereof) is visible as the series starts on a superb note and maintains its taut writing/character sketch in the beginning episodes (directed by Bharath Muralidharan), the flailing and floundering, the stretch and forced twists begins somewhere in the middle (by Ashok Veerappan) and carries into the final episodes (by Kamala Alchemis), who tries hard to use his alchemy to hold it all together, signalling a future life for the series.

In spite of the loopholes, which are not glaring to the uninitiated to the genre, Snakes & Ladders is a riveting watch. It slithers, grips and coils. But if the series didn’t take itself so seriously, bombarding it with have-seen-before cat and mouse chase sequence, and followed the brief of a dark comedy, it would have been such a fun journey. But then Indian screens haven’t seen a good dark comedy since Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983). Dark and comedy aren’t just two words bunged together in a prison cell. Together they make light of matters that are otherwise socially taboo topics. What seems bleak in a social realism film delights in a dark comedy. It has the right tools to drive home the point. But that alchemy requires deep digging, deeper than a six-feet grave.

Having said that, it doesn’t take away from the children who know not whether they have stepped on the ladder or on a snake’s tail with their every 'wrong' move. One hopes Season 2 will have these teens resolve a quandary by themselves and the adults — great actors all — would step aside. But, then, this is not that show.

Star Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.

Snakes & Ladders, also available in Telugu, is now streaming on Prime Video.