Kohrra 2 review: It was always going to be a tough act to follow.
Kohrra, out in 2023, was an instant classic with its multi-pronged approach, gathering up the tangled skeins of personal and political, individual and societal, and love and longing, tethering everything to a small Punjab town. The plot was specific to its time and place but universal in the way it touched upon human frailties, while giving us full-bodied characters. Created and written by Gunjit Chopra, Diggi Sisodia, and Sudip Sharma, and directed by Randeep Jha, it was a triumph, and one of the best series I’ve watched in recent times. Sadly, I can’t say the same for this new season, which I’d been waiting for.
Kohrra 2, armed with the same creators and writers but with the directing duties this time split between Sudip Sharma and Faisal Rahman, brings back only one set of characters from the earlier season. Barun Sobti’s local cop Garundi, and his immediate family, wife, brother and sister-in-law, with the same actors (Muskan Arora, Pardeep Singh Cheema, Ekta Sodhi respectively) reprise their roles, with a fresh set of actors. And, of course, a new murder.
There’s a good reason for Garundi to have made a shift from his ‘pind’ Jagrana to Dalerpura, where resurrected senior cop Dhanwant Kaur (Mona Singh) has been handed over the investigation of what looks like a complicated case from the get go.
Preet, the sister of well-to-do poultry farmer Baljinder Atwal (Anuraag Arora) is found dead in the homestead’s barn, with the caretaker having conveniently taken off just the night before: the victim, estranged from her US-based husband Sam (Rannvijay Singha), has been back home, which has its own tensions, with not all appearing to be well with her brother and his wife Twinkle (Mandeep Kaur Ghai). An anxious young fellow (Prayrak Mehta) from Jharkhand comes looking for his long-lost father, his only ‘nishani’ a faded photograph, and as his search lurches on, it reveals ugly truths about patterns of forced employment which fly in the face of all existing labour laws.
Who could the killer be? The needle of suspicion falls on everyone in the vicinity, beginning with the missing caretaker who has been with the family for years, and Preet’s newly-acquired boy-friend, the nicely-named Johnny Malang (Vikhyat Gulati) who’s three-timing her with a wannabe singer and an Israeli tourist. Garundi, seconded to Dhanwant, pronounces, either it is the boyfriend or husband, who else?
Watch Kohrra 2 trailer:
By now, the problems of this sequel are staring us in the face. It’s not just heavy on exposition and explanation — these kinds of obvious statements being exchanged frequently between the two cops — but its characters, including the victim, are just not interesting enough.
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In the first season, almost all characters feel like they have layers, which keep getting peeled back, and the six-episode length felt just right: even as we get to know whodunit, we also see the whys and wherefores, so crucial in memorable crime thrillers.
Many elements in the second season, also spread across six episodes, seem as if they’ve picked up from the earlier one: an NRI connection, estranged families, the widespread use of ‘chitta’, the pop music culture, Insta-reels, and so on. There’s also an awkward insertion of humor, especially with the addition of a jokey third wheel, constable Aujla (Davinder Singh) joining Dhanwant and Garundi, which feels like notes to the team to lighten up things, not to lean into the darkness as in the first season.
That was exactly why the first season worked so well. Because everything, in the writing and the direction, was in service to telling us a deeply absorbing story without bothering about appearances. If you’re wondering why the best part of the first season–the craggy, bulbous nosed Suvinder Vicky as lead cop who makes you feel the weight on his conscience — has gone missing, this could be a reason.
Mona Singh, as Vicky’s replacement, has been handed a conflicted backstory as befits a series about conflicted cops, but its edges are distinctly softer. She goes at her Dhanwant as wife-mother-cop with everything she’s got, and there’s never a place when she’s less than watchable, but Singh-and-Sobti don’t have the same ease as the original pair, who worked so well in sync. As the hot-headed Garundi, Sobti makes the most of it of his meaty role, even though we’ve seen him doing his grabbing-suspects’-crotches and being free with his fists before. It is the women in his life, Muskaan Arora as Silky and Ekta Sodhi as ‘votti’ and ‘parjaai’, who share some of the best scenes in the series.
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Ultimately, the writing overall is neither fresh nor tight enough, with some climactic revelations feeling tacked on without being worked on enough. Which results in the payoff, unlike last time, not being rewarding enough, the engrossing parts coming up only intermittently.
This is not what I expected from this cracker of a team which gave us that original Kohrra, whose writers didn’t feel the need to place the word ‘kohrra’ in a character’s mouth right in the first episode, just in case we didn’t get it. Too much tell, not enough show.
Kohrra 2 cast: Mona Singh, Barun Sobti, Anurag Arora, Rannvijay Singh, Pooja Bhamrah, Muskan Arora, Ekta Sodhi, Prayrak Mehta, Davinder Singh, Pardeep Singh Cheema, Mandeep Kaur Ghai, Pooja Pathak, Vikhyat Gulati
Kohrra 2 directors: Sudip Sharma, Faisal Rahman
Kohrra 2 rating: 2.5 stars
