It takes a lot to stay level-headed about a bad show, but here goes. Somewhere deep within the edgy-Halloween-party-gone-wrong hollowness of this six-episode riff on Karan Johar’s nepo-induction franchise featuring teeny-bopper colleges and bubblegum love triangles and prestigious annual competitions, there is an idea. It has something to do with the aesthetic of Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’: a schooling system so abusive that the Student of the Year contest is an exclusive Squid Game-like tournament with red jumpsuits designed to make unstable Indian teens destroy each other for a mythical survival-of-the-fittest prize. But it’s a hipster idea so blunted by the folds of ivory-tower storytelling and Instagram-filmmaking that, by the time it emerges, it’s an icy corpse floating under a frozen pond.
The suspects are introduced: jealous bestie Tara (the implication is that she’s dumb because she speaks in Gen-Z), over-perfect boyfriend with daddy issues Sid, a bitter roommate nicknamed Babydoll (no, she doesn’t have a twin called Sone Di) who insists on addressing Aditi as ‘Judwa Edition,’ and rejected lover Rehaan who’s the token minority boy in a class full of barbie-fied pookies (did I get that right?). The adults comprise a creepy new dean who will do anything to protect the school, Sid’s big-bully bro and his board-member dad, and Aditi’s parents who struggle to accept the loss of their golden daughter. Their flashbacks may or may not involve a child-actor past, and a whole lot of exploitation disguised as parenting. Actually, it does involve that. I’m not sure why I said “may or may not,” but perhaps I’m padding up the review just like the wafer-thin series stretches itself to six episodes.
Midway through the first episode, it becomes obvious that the series is more interested in manufacturing internet-gen coolth than in making sense. It trades any sort of substance for a music-video vibe that’s too often abused by mainstream cinema. You stop caring about the whodunit and start getting irritated with the tonal gimmicks: the timeline trickery, non-linear structures for no reason, hyperactive edits, goth-pop conflicts, twisted backstories (a priest who gets catfished by his illegitimate daughter?), the curated darkness of the Scooby-Doo-stakes plot, and the unwavering commitment to staging the interiors of Mumbai’s St. Xavier’s College as Mohabbatein’s Gurukul: After Dark edition. The problem is that not once does this look like a subverted campus drama: the school is merely an atmospheric location for youngsters who seem to be role-playing as students in a murder-mystery party game. We see humans scrambling through corridors and secret basements and auditoriums and chapels as if they’re reality-show environments, not the Greatest School Ever setting that it’s supposed to be.
The contest itself is the show’s Eat-the-rich fetish, but it’s not very creative. Early on, when Aditi gatecrashes the qualifier round (a scrap to nab electric torches), the Bigg Boss God voice asks her to sign an NDA and reasons with her about her participation despite having a trust fund. What a polite creator. You want to imagine that the writing is political when she calls herself a “cockroach” to show dissent, but then you remember that her grand plan is to find her sister’s murderer. It’s not that deep. One stage features pairs of contestants mentally disintegrating each other across a table by saying mean things (heart-rates that cross 120 bpm are eliminated), but the staging fails at a primal level: when one pair is shown having a go, the other tables in the background are silent, like inert props waiting to be activated after every ‘scene’. It’s the equivalent of the old-Bollywood movie habit where goons patiently wait their turn to attack the hero, one at a time, instead of ganging up on him together.
The final round is almost imaginative — the remaining participants must wear a hypnosis device and navigate their worst nightmares and hidden demons, which thereby throws up the identity of the killer. It would be neat if the climax weren’t executed like a stage play on steroids. It would also be neat if the viewer were left with an inkling of patience after five-and-a-half episodes of soda-fizz suspense. Not to mention some of the detailing: sleeping pills that resemble pink chana dal grains, tasers that Aditi uses to subdue the gang and interrogate them, digital scribbles that use the screen as a diary, and so on. When in doubt, a Goibibo hoarding enters frames nonchalantly, as if to ask: “Me and product placement? Never”.
The cast is largely synthetic. Shanaya Kapoor goes the Alia-in-Highway no-glam way, but there’s not enough of Aayesha to judge Aditi as a double-role performance; the character is written as a single note of angst instead of a symphony of micro-aggressions. Kapoor does what she can as the rebel with a convoluted cause, but the series keeps defeating her. The rest of the young actors — especially Manya Grover as the bimbo-coded best friend — hide behind the crutch of ham-and-pulp turns; they all play cartoon figures who are forced to be live-action suspects. As a result, the social commentary barely registers. The purpose seldom appears. How can it? Everyone’s trauma is too busy being someone’s costume. Nobody expected “We don’t need no education” to be taken so literally.
