In Netflix’s Killer Soup, a bowl of paya soup (bone broth) is routinely shepherded across locations, places and situations. Every time, though, people find an excuse to not consume it. The cook’s unreliable, the specimen uninvited and the intent maybe suspect. It is in some sense the kernel of truth at the heart of a narrative that spirals around a portable bowl of incompetence. A steamy, depraved, but chaotically assembled stew of aspiration, desire and malcontent, this series flourishes as an observational document of clumsiness. Killer Soup is set in the hills of Kerala, amidst some eerily amoral people played by one of the finest acting buffets streaming has put together in recent times. It’s joyous, silly, entertaining, illogical and strung together with performative genius.
Konkona Sen Sharma plays Swathy, an amateur cook trying to get on the good side of her rich but corrupt husband Prabhakar (Manoj Bajpayee). Prabhakar is dull but cocky, bankrupt but larger-than-life in every other way. Swathy, though polite and devotional on the eye lives a bit of a double life herself. She is having an affair with her husband’s masseuse, a runaway bandit named Umesh (also played by Bajpayee) who kind of looks like Prabhakar. Umesh is feeble, soft and a bit of a joker. Bajpayee is so categorically brilliant in both roles, it’s hard to say which one you’d rather watch more of. After he catches Swathy and Umesh in the act, Prabhakar has a meltdown which becomes his cardiovascular undoing. Swathy hacks a plan to replace her dead husband with her lover - a conceit as far-fetched as this story is persuasively wacky.
Also read: How Killer Soup on Netflix cast Manoj Bajpayee, Konkona Sen Sharma, Sayaji Shinde, Nassar and Malayalam actor Lal
With Umesh stepping into Prabhakar’s shoes, chaos unfolds as family secrets, former lovers and hidden wounds tumble out of poorly guarded closets. It’s one mala fide act of deception after another as masks slip, plans flail and guts twitch. To the startling brilliance of the lead pair, there is the added excellence of a multi-lingual cast which includes Nassar as a grumpy local inspector and Lal as the doting uncle of a rebellious girl. Sayaji Shinde, who can play foul-mouthed villains in his sleep, is ecstatically unhinged as Prabhakar’s older brother Arvind. His blasphemous, disenchanted self undermines everything with the kind of defeatism that feels all too relatable. He is a goon who has hit his ceiling. That he looks perpetually on the cusp of a stroke makes all the more sense, amidst people high on fantasies and low on discernible skill.
Directed and co-created by Abhishek Chaubey alongside Unaiz Merchant and Harshad Nalawade, Killer Soup has a kooky premise that it follows up with wackier treatment. The sleuths are amateur, the policemen sloppy, the killers afraid and the victims determinedly suicidal. It’s a world full of nincompoops who witlessly go after the low-hanging fruit of gratification. There is however this comical sincerity to it all, echoed almost perfectly by Sharma’s Swathy. A woman who can’t seem to commit to either her husband or her lover, but envies both with an equal passion. Her countenance, enraged eyes and sharpness suggest a darkness but her methods fail to live up to the hype of her impressions. A sequence where she is followed by a fidgety cop is the ringing image of her life; her frivolity is itself a kind of conviction.
Killer Soup inherits a bit from Chaubey’s filmography. Coincidences drive the plot, guns go off uncontrolled, sleaze punctuates the narrative and crescendos of emotion are resolved through curated accidents. There is a sense of tragicomedy about this world where nobody is really who they seem, except when they are greedy, horny or unhinged. To a world populated by such depravity, the band-aid of grafted chaos feels fitting and gloriously seductive. Making sense or eking moral platitudes out of it would be as pointless as the little betrayals that blow up in characters’ faces. To that effect, Killer Soup is firmly interested in boiling the pot and witness it simmer with rage and combustible buffoonery. More than a comedy of errors, however, this feels like a comedy of personalities driven by direness, achieved by a cast capable of livening material that can at times feel caricatured. Accident followed by accident, fits the profile of feature film but at 8 episodes long, it can seem weary and unfocused. Not if you have Sharma and Bajpayee, though.
At this point it’s hard to imagine or reminisce about a poor Manoj Bajpayee performance. Here, he is saddled with the hardest of tasks - to merge two categorically different personalities into one. And yet somehow Bajpayee, so proverbially godlike in everything he touches on streaming these days, pulls it off with seeming ease (and some welcome sleaze). More than the disbelief it takes to buy into the show’s unlikely premise, it is disbelief at this man’s peerless, habitual excellence that beggars both belief and faith. But Bajpayee isn’t alone, for Sharma brings her own potluck of menace and sinister opportunism to the table. This is perhaps one of the best cast shows in recent memory, supported by great cinematography and dialogue that thankfully dispossesses the notion of a lone language. It may not make logical sense all the time, but then with talent so lordly, maybe it doesn’t have to.
Killer Soup is now streaming on Netflix
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