Brown review: Karisma Kapoor is the best thing about a show stuck in 2021
Abhinay Deo's ZEE5 series hands Karisma Kapoor a meaty role as a broken Kolkata detective, then traps her in a thriller that has been done to death.
Brown is well acted, well mounted, well located and completely unsurprising.
Somewhere in the past five years, the Indian crime thriller stopped being a story and became a mood. We know the grammar by now. A cop with a dead spouse and a drinking problem. A city shot like it owes the cinematographer money. A murder that matters less than the grief piled on top of it. So much of streaming has settled into this groove that you can predict a whole show from its first frame of rain on a windshield. Brown, the seven-episode ZEE5 series directed by Abhinay Deo (Delhi Belly), speaks this grammar fluently. The trouble is that it doesn't seem to know any other language.
It belongs to a very particular wave, too. Call it the Mare of Easttown (2021 American crime drama series) effect. Ever since Kate Winslet trudged through a grey Pennsylvania town, Hindi storytellers have been busy assembling their own tired women with badges. Kareena Kapoor Khan did it in The Buckingham Murders. Raveena Tandon did it in Aranyak. Now Karisma Kapoor does it in Brown.
The optics are easy to like — a woman allowed to be exhausted, unglamorous, good at her job and wrecked in her life. But optics are also cheap. What these shows almost never earn is a world that feels built rather than borrowed. They want Mare's silhouette without the specificity that made it so compelling.
Murder, money and family prestige
The plot is fairly straightforward. Rita Brown (Karisma Kapoor), a once-celebrated Kolkata detective, is pulled back to work to investigate the murder of Ahana Jaiswal (Vaibhavi Malhotra), the daughter of one of the city's richest men, Dheeraj Jaiswal (Ajinkya Deo). Her body is found at home and when a second woman turns up killed the same way, the fear of a serial murderer sets in.
So Rita and her deputy Arjun Sinha (Surya Sharma) work their way through a tight circle of suspects, most of them tied to the Jaiswal name — the dead girl's volatile brother (Paresh Pahuja), her violent ex (Aryann Bhowmik), her best friend (Ahalya Shetty) and her therapist (Jisshu Sengupta), who quietly turns into one of the show's more interesting threads.
Across its seven episodes, the truth that surfaces is less a whodunit than a portrait of how money and family close ranks to protect their own.
Also read: Ram Charan's Peddi review: Another 'hero hype' formula falls flat
Indeed, it is nice to see Kapoor on screen after this long and on her part, she does hold up her end of the bargain. Her Rita Brown is back to work after two years and a private catastrophe. She rolls her own cigarettes, drinks like it's her full-time job, and carries the ghost of a dead husband (Shaan, in a smart piece of casting).
Kapoor does almost none of the things that made her a 90s star. She lets her shoulders sag, her voice goes flat and allows the camera to find the tiredness instead of acting it out. You believe her even in scenes the writing doesn't deserve her in.
Old mystery, older series
It helps to know that Brown is older than it looks and that it also simply looks dated. The series was shot roughly five years ago and sat on a shelf for around three years before ZEE5 remembered to release it. You can feel those lost years in every frame. What might have read as fresh and atmospheric in 2021 or 2022 now arrives as a genre that has already been done to death and then dug back up.
Paatal Lok (2020) and Kohrra (2023) found ways to bend the form from the inside. Brown just follows it, beat for beat, like a student who memorised the syllabus but doesn’t quite boast the critical thinking skills to argue with it.
Karisma Kapoor deserved the distinctive universe this kind of role was supposed to come with. Instead, she got the look of one.
To its credit, the show is handsome and it picks the right city. A dark, damp, half-crumbling Kolkata is the perfect host for this kind of rot. Director Deo, adapting Abheek Barua's novel City of Death, lets the place do a lot of the heavy lifting — old houses lit like little museums, lanes slick with something you'd rather not name, Rabindra Sangeet drifting in to remind you where you are in case you forget.
Also read: Bandar review: Anurag Kashyap's prison drama has ambition, but without the follow-through
Some of the people are good company, too. Rita's mother (Soni Razdan) and her aunt (Helen) bring a warmth that the plot keeps trying to snuff out. Rita’s grieving deputy, Arjun, does restraint well, acting as a perfect foil to Kapoor’s protagonist.
But a good cast and a good location can't cover a hollow middle. The mystery is the weakest thing here. You can spot the killer almost the second they walk in, partly because of how the role is cast, and then the show spends seven episodes pretending that you cannot. Around this, it keeps stacking filler — media trials, scheming politicians, a senior who yanks Rita off the case, subplots that lead nowhere worth going.
The gaze is the bigger worry. Almost every woman who isn't Rita exists to be hurt, used or killed. The show seems convinced it's exposing how families and cities let this happen. But mostly it just lingers. It doesn't help that the dialogue keeps reaching for profundity it hasn't earned — when the killer asks Rita what frightens her most, she answers "love", a line that sounds deep but lands as nothing.
So we're left with a familiar trade. Brown is well acted, well mounted, well located and completely unsurprising. The performances and the mood almost carry it. But a show can't live on the strength of everything around its story. Strip away the texture and the talent and what's left is a template — the haunted cop, the dead girl, the guilty city — assembled with great care and no real reason.
Karisma Kapoor deserved the distinctive universe this kind of role was supposed to come with. Instead, she got the look of one. In a genre this tired, looking the part stopped being enough a while ago.
