Kohrra Season 2 review: Mona Singh, Barun Sobti anchor an emotionally rich but meek mystery

Another NRI, this time a woman, is found dead in Season 2 of Kohrra, which sees the original creator team of Sudip Sharma, Gunjit Chopra and Diggi Sisodia bringing back the themes that powered the first iteration. The winter has cast a fuzzy shadow on a Punjab that doesn’t want to be bothered. The fog is thicker by the day, shawls, mittens and sweaters are in full employment, and the time to snuggle in mustn’t be used for probings that are sure to turn the status quo on its head. But for commanding officer Dhanwant Kaur (Mona Singh) and newly-transferred assistant SI Amarpal Garundi (Barun Sobti), there’s no choice but to take the plunge in the frigid waters.

The murdered woman, Preet Bajwa (Pooja Bhamrrah), points initially at an entanglement involving an unscrupulous husband (played by Rannvijay Singh), an older brother doused in debt (Anurag Arora), and a dancing content creator who was also her boyfriend. Preet’s body, with its centre pierced undeniably by a long and sharp machete-like tool, is found by her ageing mother in the cowshed, right next to where the buffaloes empty their bladders. The lanes of Dalerpura form a catacomb, and the homes look crammed and slightly misshapen, but nothing can be taken at face value here. Just as one couldn’t ever guess that the neighbours in this seemingly nondescript town are living in Italy, the mystery behind Preet’s death, too, is far from obvious.

Masculinity and male identity

For Sudip Sharma (who shares directing credit on all episodes with Faizal Rahman) and co., the leisure is found in the luxury of time that the web series format offers. The languid storytelling takes its time in introducing elements and features that are to ball up together over the next 5-6 hours, as the writing creates a definitive mood and texture.

Rural Punjab has welcomed evangelists who have remixed iconic folk songs, such as Baari Barsi. Social media has created regional stars Johnny Malang, Bunny Gulati and others. Men openly drink at illegal thekas while crooning wistful songs. Cops take time off from a high-profile murder case for Lohri celebrations. This part of Punjab still finds itself in the throes of an insurgency that took place more than three decades ago.

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The complexity explored in the social fabric helps the creators to once again trample the stereotyping of a place and its cadence. There is a lived-in quality in the writing which handholds us into a home that breathes and behaves distinctively. The Punjabi spoken is of multiple shades, from unintelligible to obligatory Hindi-sounding, and the sights that Isshaan Ghosh’s cinematography captures never feels aestheticised, even for the just-as-tempting ‘anti’ effect. Nor does the narrative ever aspire to absolve its setting from the grim, and honestly universal, reality it is inspired by.

The premise of masculinity and male identity runs deep in Season 2, with some novel results. Mona Singh’s Dhanwant arrives as the familiar haggard cop, whose long, hurting gaze immediately suggests that her personal life has a great void in it. The reasons for her downcast temperament might not be out-of-the-box, yet the way this character fits into the show's scope is special. Dhanwant is a woman in the grips of a severely male-dominated world, and one easily spots how its inherent high-handed and persuasive nature has rubbed off on her. It isn’t that she postures to seem masculine; she has simply internalised the code that governs the system.

When she learns that her husband has been missing their IVF treatment appointments, she will make sure to send a couple of subordinates to escort him from his workplace to the clinic. If he doesn’t feel like participating in it, she feels she knows better, just as all men do around her.

Dhanwant-Garundi equation

It is to Singh’s credit that she never lets these attributes be pronounced, but rather feels a part of Dhanwant’s compulsion. Her Dhanwant is of inner strength that is crumbling faster than she’d like, yet she is trained all her adult life to stay in control. There have been blemishes in her career, there have been huge setbacks in her private life, and there doesn’t seem to be enough space around her to let out the bubbling melancholia. Singh mostly watches on in the proceedings, as if for answers, and there is a certain repetitiveness in this particular exercise that has a lasting effect.

Her dynamic with Barun Sobti’s Garundi isn’t forced either, nor does it seem retrofitted. Stories such as this often tend to afford room for personal conversations that try to humanise institutional actors such as the police. Kohrra is specifically designed to move beyond the archetypes, and Season 2 gets specific with Dhanwant and Garundi as expected. Except that it doesn’t foist a friendship on them: whatever the equation the two share is based purely on empathy and not obligation.

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Sobti’s arc here continues from where the previous season left it, although it feels a lot more drawled. The slow emphasis on his new marriage to Silky (Muskan Arora) finds its charm in tracing the push and pull of his recent past, which also involves his brother Jung and sister-in-law Rajji (Ekta Sodhi). The study of the aftermath of his affair with Rajji produces interesting results at first, before it veers towards predictability. Sobti is solid in the role, although Pardeep Singh Cheema as Jung walks away with a role of better nuance, but the solutions the writers offer to their collective intricate problem are as conveniently mawkish as they are confusing.

The idea of the outsider

The idea of the outsider, too, finds a prominent place in Season 2, with the non-resident Indian making way for the migrant Indian here. Despite this being the 50th year of the abolition of bonded labour in India, enslavement is yet to be wiped out. Sudip Sharma and co. conspicuously borrow from real-life incidents involving labourers from states such as Bihar and UP being trafficked and subjected to work under brutal conditions in interior Punjab. The outsider, just as before, highlights a cultural and systemic flaw in the insider, but Kohrra doesn’t shy away from accepting the truth. Prayrak Mehta, as Arun, a young Jharkhand man looking for his missing father, is compelling with his performance.

At the same time, the new season lacks the snap that its predecessor did. Season 1 was economical and also inventive in the way it combined the police procedural/mystery genre with a sense of a contemporary time and place, whereas Season 2 feels uneven in that regard. The latter assumes a slightly self-serious tone and invests a lot of its efforts in creating an elegiac, thoughtful mood, which doesn’t come across as fully organic.

Characters are asked to speak with a certain bleakness that becomes overbearing beyond a point. Multiple sequences end up underlining or exaggerating story facts and emotions. Even the episode titles, like ‘The Dead Never Leave’ and ‘The Chains That Bind Us’, feel a bit too much on the nose. It could be the demand of the longer format itself that a story needs to “linger” and be told in a palatable way, but Season 2 still doesn’t make the most of its large canvas. Despite the runtime, most characters aside from the protagonists feel distant and barely layered.

Kohrra Season 2 isn’t as piercing or potent as a follow-up. Its central mystery doesn’t intrigue much either, and the labyrinthine plot drawn to get to an epic crescendo lands with a screech louder than expected. Yet, the show continues to be guided by the right kinds of curiosities, and the pursuits do carry refreshing results. It has also grown safer in the way it deals with the human condition and justice, so here's hoping that the upcoming instalments (if any) return without feeling bogged down by the pressures of the OTT IP system.