Mandala Murders Review | A Derivative Atmospheric Thriller That Becomes Sillier as It Moves Forward

An atmospheric thriller that tries to fill scientific voids using fantasy ideas of black magic is an interesting concept, and the intention of the new Netflix series Mandala Murders, by Gopi Puthran, produced by YRF, is to tap into that zone. However, what they have ultimately managed to create here is an extremely derivative-looking thriller that has unnecessary buildups for simplistic twists and excessive spoonfeeding through dialogue. Mandala Murders would work for someone only if they are beginning to explore the series format after watching the present Hindi mainstream horror thrillers.

Charandaspur is a city in Uttar Pradesh. Vikram Singh, a suspended cop from the Delhi police and born in Charandaspur, has reached there to find out about his mom, who went missing when he was a small boy. But before he could begin the journey, he happened to see a dead body of someone he knew, and the nature of the murder and things associated with it gave Vikram a feeling that there was a connection with that death and the disappearance of his mother. What we see in the series are Vikram’s efforts to find his mother and the investigative team’s steps to find out the people behind the creepy murders that followed.

There is a surge in ambient viewing content in our OTT space, and we have seen how good shows like Kaalapani got cancelled, and miserable ones like Call Me Bae got renewed by platforms. When you look at the pitch of the drama in a show like Mandala Murders, you get a sense that the writing of the series is deliberately making it loud for the audience. There is a character named Pramod, an officer in the UP Police. The kind of things the screenplay makes him do in the name of comedy is so bad that when something bad happens to that character, we absolutely feel zero empathy. Then there is another character named Jimmy Khan, who in one scene is reading a book aloud, and he has a conversation with himself about the events and characters described in the book. Those portions are so annoyingly bad that it is like Jimmy Khan is Joe, and the audience is Chandler, and we feel like screaming at the character, “get there faster.”

Created by Gopi Puthran, the man who wrote Rani Mukherji’s Mardaani movies and directed Mardaani 2, Mandala Murders is underestimating the audience and is spoonfeeding them information in the lamest way. There is this romantic dynamic between two of the main characters, and the way the series has done character exposition through dialogue will make you do a facepalm. The characters are standing near a window and reminiscing about their first encounter, and you can really see the creative hollowness in conveying someone’s past. Without cutting into any visuals, we are just seeing two people talking about the details of their first meeting, with nobody listening to them. As the Story progresses towards a showdown-like climax, the themes similar to reincarnation and the way it tries to add a layer of science to the whole black magic thing start to sound more immature.

Shaz Mohammed uses these highly saturated shades of blue and warm tones to create the kind of mystical texture the Story demands. Some of the fight sequences in the film that are meant to show the heroine as a very able officer lack impact. Many times, the sound design and the unimpressive cuts make the fights look like the goons were letting Vaani Kapoor win the fight. The production design has that set-like feel in all those key areas, and it was making those scenes less eerie.

Vaani Kapoor is the one heading the investigation in the series, and it is your typical investigation officer arc where they have some past trauma haunting them. The performance is kind of satisfactory, with her dialogue delivery at times slipping into the old Katrina Kaif zone. Vaibhav Raj Gupta as Vikram Singh struggles to convey the emotions when the character is going through extreme pain. Surveen Chawla as Ananya Bhardwaj maintains that mysterious grace in portraying that character. However, the screenplay struggles to sustain the mystery around the character. Hence, after a point, this character felt less intriguing. Jameel Khan as Jimmy Khan was able to make his character’s quirkiness believable despite the writing being very sloppy in certain areas. Shriya Pilgaonkar and Monica Chaudhary are the other main names in the cast, along with cameo-like appearances from Raghubir Yadav and Sunny Hinduja.

The idea of using one method of satanic worship to create a series format content that has the scope to spread into something big makes sense on paper. But Gopi Puthran and his team are not making an effort to make it exciting for the audience by making them subconsciously solve this riddle. The thought of a particle physicist making a wish-granting machine is presented here with the logical coherence of Balaji Telefilms serials.