‘Dahaad’ review | Guns, genre, gender: A sharp thriller on psychopathy and crimes against women

Sonakshi Sinha in a still from 'Dahaad'.

Dahaad, created by Reema Kagti and Zoya Akhtar — and directed by Kagti and Ruchika Oberoi — is a highly effective ‘Howcatchem’ thriller. As opposed to a Whodunit, a Howcatchem is a murder mystery in which the audience knows early on who the criminal is. The narrative then hinges around the detective’s attempt to nab the rogue, along with subsidiary puzzles such as intent and modus operandi.

Its plotting is clever, a credit to the adroit architecture of the plot and manipulation of dramatic tension by the writers — Kagti, Akhtar and others. The characters have hard rings of truth, and despite a slack tapering at the end in the last two episodes — tonally uncharacteristic to the first six, taut episodes — Dahaad is a sharp thriller with atmospheric, low-key tone and texture, set to a background score of languorous Rajasthani folk tunes. Without showing the desert and polychromatic exotica of Rajasthan, we see a Rajasthan that’s sleepy, foreboding and a symptomatic capsule of the larger compromised legal and justice system of India. A tone of encumbering woe envelops the setting and tone, but the screenplay takes us to higher ground steadily, and with intent. The story corresponds starkly with reality too: In a 2020 crime study report by the National Crime Records Bureau, Rajasthan is only second to Delhi in all numbers related to crime against women. A report by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India that came out in 2022 specifically on prevention, protection and redressal of crime against women in Rajasthan, says that incidence of registered crime against women in Rajasthan increased from 18,344 in 2010 to 41,623 in 2019 registering a growth of 126.90 per cent. Crime rate against women in Rajasthan was consistently higher than all India average and its neighbouring states, the report adds.

Dahaad means roar, and in much of the eight-episode series on Amazon Prime Video which dropped on May 12, roars of all kinds play out — although much of it is stifled. The literal roar of efforts to nab the killer at the centre of it all is negligible; the roar of his victims are inaudible, they only froth. The most eloquent dahaad is that of the impulses that drive its characters — generational trauma, the father and mother wounds putrefied in the psyche of the characters. Psychological trauma is one of the story’s prime agents. On the one hand is the victim profile: single women in their 30s or 40s reconciled to being taunted by society because of their marital status or social status, who are seen as “trouble” and who, the story proffers, are easy targets to the charms of a middle-aged man seemingly attuned to their situation and desires. On the other hand is a man whose slow wreckage culminating in psychosis began when he witnessed a harrowing act of his father and who couldn’t be seen as man enough in his affluent, textbook-normal family of jewellers. And at the centre of it, driving the action with equal conviction, is a Dalit woman police officer investigating a case of cascading deaths of women in the same way over and over again across Rajasthan — her generational trauma is more political. It manifests as an unresolved conflict with her harrowed mother who is making desperate attempts to direct her daughter into the domesticity orbit through an arranged marriage into a family higher in social status than them. The decisive, diligent daughter, the hero of the story, is undeterred to such an extent that she has no emotional, characteristically feminine needs. Another disastrous explosion in the making? The first season doesn’t have that answer.

We meet Anjali Bhaati (Sonakshi Sinha) as she struggles to gain momentum on a case investigating deaths of women in and around Mandawa, a small town in Rajasthan in the Jhujhunu district along with her bosses, head of the Mandawa Police Station Devi Lal Singh (Gulshan Devaiah) and his subordinate Kailash Parghi (Sohum Shah). Anand Swarnakar (Vijay Varma) plays a professor of Hindi in the local college. He lives with his wife, who works at a hotel, and his impressionable, teenaged son. His father and brother run a jewellery shop as family business. It’s obvious he is the family’s black sheep, and that he seeks out the company of women of a certain age and social class. As the number of murders start threatening the safety of the sleepy town and its neighbouring towns and cities with alarming frequency, the story builds up to Anjali meting out the much awaited, climactic poetic justice.

There’s nothing in Dahaad by way of stunning disclosures and revelations. The procedural is written in a fool-proof, rigorous way with the right emphasis on crucial details. Nothing jars — it is a slow, assured path to the big close-in. Up to the sixth episode, the series crackles with tension and direness. The final two episodes hang like afterthoughts — at six episodes, Dahaad could’ve had the kind of briskness and density that it deserves. Episodes Seven and Eight seem to have been added for the rather gratuitous purpose of delaying the climax, to make Anjali’s success all the more sweeter — which it doesn’t.

So, the big pivot in Dahaad isn’t as much the procedural or a big reveal. It is somewhat about the power dynamics that underpin the criminal justice system and society at large. The story’s master stroke is its unblinking engagement with the nature of criminality: How can an ordinary man, driven by ordinary rage, kill? All crime dramas embrace human crassness, and there is enough of it in Dahaad, but that’s not the story’s point. The writers eke the action out of character studies, specifically the character of Anand. We’ve seen similar trajectories in crime thrillers of recent times — Mare of Easttown and The Undoing on Hotstar, Unbelievable on Netflix, and others in the past few years have shown what happens when writers of crime dramas move away from classic Hollywood tropes and imbue their stories with the psychological alchemies that allow crime and brutality to thrive, or when the atmospherics and milieu can saturate a crime canvas like in the great Swiss and Scandinavian crime universes.

Vijay Varma.

Varma has a fine mettle for implosive, explosive, festering masculine rage as we recently saw in Netflix’s Darlings. Here, he elevates the same quality of dangerous masculinity that generational trauma and paternal wounding can breed to the scale of a lead character. The fact that this lead character is in opposition with a steadfast, courageous and angry, Dalit woman, who her community and bosses trust as well as resent, is more fodder for a more intricate conflict. The battle is as much between innocence or naïve and evil or deranged as between man and woman. Gender dynamics catapult the series to its riveting, really entertaining quality. Varma is a fearless, committed actor whose work in Dahaad is unmatched by most other actors of his generation. It will be a pity if he is pigeonholed into Bollywood’s favourite new psycho.

Sinha’s ability to embody Anjali — a pet of her deceased father who encouraged her to join the police force, her surname is a cover to fend off discrimination against Dalits — is impressive. She is consistent with every tick of her character. There’s not much joy or humour in Anjali — unlike, say, Mare in Mare of Eastown, a similar role of a small-town police officer investigating multiple murders, played memorably by Kate Winslet, who is a character pretty close to a  convincing feminine wreck hemmed in by grief besides being the gutsy lead investigator with a personal stake in the case. Anjali is angry because of the historical burdens of belonging to a caste that constantly taunts her and attempts to make her invisible. The success in this case gives her the fillip she is searching for, the justification she needs for her disinterest in anything that her traditional mother imagines for her. The series also doesn’t make a song and dance about feminism — the inherent feminism is in watching Anjali and her team fight for women. Sinha is suitably in character throughout and makes the perfectly solid opposition to Varma’s Anand. She adopts a heavy walk, the official uniform often crinkled and out of shape, without obvious make-up, adopts a drawly Rajasthani accent. She as well as her town Mandawa are grey, as if they are under a constant cloud.

There’s no imploring of sympathy for the psychopathic, there’s no fetishising of entitled, rotten masculinity, only an engagement with what  the repression of the Indian male of a certain class and race — and the insensitivity that parents show towards little boys — could lead to. Dahaad makes us look at the kind of man whose grief nobody, least of all women, are safe with. The entire story, in fact, swims with and through grief without making much of it.

It has the big finale climax, of course, which ties up the story neatly. It also has a smaller, more symbolic and more interesting end, the end that we couldn’t have predicted. A symbolic decision of Anjali leaves us with a sense that life may still be tough, perhaps, even tougher now for this steely hero, but there is enough hope that the sun may shine on her a bit, at long last.