Aarya Season 3 review: Sushmita Sen continues to dazzle in a show that shifts gears for good and bad

Possibly no other casting choice in the Indian streaming era has fit the details of its demands as perfectly as Sushmita Sen in Aarya. (Screen grab/YouTube/Disney+Hotstar)

“Kabhi kabhi apne bachon ki hifaazat ke liye ek maa ko rakshas banna padta hai,” Aarya quietly declares to her aide Sampat, in a scene from the third season of the eponymously titled Disney+Hotstar series. The mother-without-borders trope returns in what has been Indian streaming’s most consistent show, a delicate mix of soapy, plot-heavy threads dipped in the cursive sauce of visual and aural poetry. Long-form storytelling has rarely exhibited such panache and deftness in exacting something so familiar yet viscerally heightened. Aarya was never ground-breaking, but it manages to flawlessly adapt a certain sitcom sensibility, to the longer tunnels of streaming. In its third season, the show settles into the dish, foamier than ever, pulls in the walls, loses a bit of edge, but remains stylishly watchable still.

We begin the third season where we ended the first. Aarya, played by the brilliant Sushmita Sen, has renounced her innocence for the sake of her children. She is now a don, orchestrating drug deals, cozying up to Russian mobs and standing her ground in the face of generational peril. The fallout from last season’s events hangs over her children, as Sooraj (Indraneil Sengupta) returns to India to avenge his wife’s ‘unintented’ murder at the hands of Aarya and her close friend Maya (Maya Sarao). Revenge is not the only form of acid corroding our protagonist’s horizon, for ACP Khan (Vikas Kumar) continues to be on her trail, as professional and personal rivalries cut across the moody, at times placid texture of the show.

Aarya’s third season feels squished for space and context, with the rickety pace of a survival thriller unfolding at the chaotic rhythm of a rehearsal. Events unfold at a turgid pace, which allows little to no time to review or even contemplate. It’s one wave of paranoia and reactionary world-saving after another, and though there is this sense of intimacy about a hedged in battle across family lines all along, you can argue Aarya could have done with a loser death-grip on its protagonist. Give her something other than a gun or a shovel to hold. Consequently, a lot of sub-plots do not get the time they deserve. Aarya’s son Veer, played with spectacular calm and maturity by Viren Vazirani, for example, steps into the shoes of a messy, sentimental adult without being allowed the space to actually grow into the world.

Directed by Ram Madhvani, Aarya’s first two seasons earned it the right to continue traipsing into melancholic, at times languidly paced encores about violence being thrust upon a reluctant mother. The second season was immensely personal, and though the third somewhat follows up the act, what it manufactures in terms of whispery commotion, it loses in terms of scenery. That esoteric sense of place has been dispensed with in favour of a closed-doors format that apes the leanness of a sitcom, as opposed to a literary marathon unveiling at an indulgent pace. As a result, there’s more to take in but less to keep, in a series that does not know where to plant its next formidable idea.

That said, this is still a brilliantly put together sensorial experience so stylistically unique in the streaming space, it might eventually lead to an imitative cycle of projects that look budgeted but exhale that deep, meaningful air of self-importance. Aarya isn’t thick or mercurial in its writing – it never was – but is just presented in this compatible, self-serious manner which gives it a sense of authority and originality. The yogic chants that punctuate scenes, the exposition-heavy dialogue, even the gloomy visual texture support a world that doesn’t hesitate from becoming nasty or dreary. And for all those things alone, it remains watchable despite its now evident struggles to expand its own language.

Possibly no other casting choice in the Indian streaming era has fit the details of its demands as perfectly as Sushmita Sen has taken to the character of a mother forced to turn into an animal for the sake of her children. All the suave lull that the show feeds the scenery with, gets corrupted every time people, including Aarya herself, pick up the gun and start shooting unscrupulously. But you trust Madhvani and Sen to reshuffle the playlist, get into the groove of something that feels sinister for as long as it resists explosion. It’s in that strenuous, but long-drawn scream that Madhvani has found a unique voice. A voice that perpetually wields the gun, but never quite fires it. If only he would have stuck to it, because in season 3, the trigger is repeatedly pulled, at times with an aim in mind, at times to convince you there is one.