SUPERB IDEA, POOR EXECUTION

intentions as an entertainer and a vehicle for socio-political comment.

Yet, it all starts to meander after a point. A runtime of below two hours starts feeling too stretched, and for a lm that primarily tries regaling as a suspense drama, that bit is a downer. Choked somehow lacks the familiar Anurag Kashyap touch of assuredness, a disappointment as the lm held all the promise of being an all-out winner.

middle-class Mumbai of 2016. The story begins in October, a month before the India’s demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes would take place.

The plot is centred on a family of three, bank employee Sarita (Saiyami Kher); her unemployed, struggling musician husband Sushant (Roshan Mathew); and their son. Sushant, who can never hold on to a job, has piled up a sizeable debt while Sarita hardly tries to hide her exasperation. Their daily bickering sessions are a staple for the neighbours.

A twist in the tale comes when Sarita discovers the drainpipe below their kitchen sink over owing with neatly- packed bundles of currency notes. What's more, the accidental bounty isn't a one-off coincidence. It starts occurring every night.

What follows is meant to be a gripping saga of secrets and cover-ups, though Kashyap throws in an expected dose of comment between the lines, too. Sarita's ready willingness to make best use of her freak fortune, without stopping to bother about reason or consequence, underlines a world where money is all that matters. When demonetisation happens out of the blue, Kashyap gets a chance to take a few sly political jibes at "achhe din" (good days).

Doubtless, Choked touts the right

Still, the effort makes for a hearty one-time watch, primarily for a brilliant cast. For Saiyami Kher, being Sarita was the assertion she needed in order to prove that her debut act in Mirzya (2016) is a nightmare best buried in the past. Saiyami gets Sarita's middleclass working woman/homemaker body language admirably right, just as she impresses in exuding the protagonist's silent angst over a past failure in life. The particular incident of her past is interestingly used in the story to justify her recklessness, as she goes about with her get-rich-quick mission.

Roshan Mathew as Sushant and Upendra Limaye as Reddy the shady moneylender are a delight to watch, but the recracker in the cast has to be Amruta Subhash. Playing the friendly neighbourhood ‘tai’, she delivers the scene of the lm in her reaction at the news of demonetisation. It's priceless.

Choked scores with a superb idea thatthe cast delivers with gusto. With a little more pace and storytelling punch, this could have been the season's wackiest OTT entertainer.

Vinayak Chakravorty

WHERE ARE THE SCARES?

of course. He hires a military squad to ensure the job gets done.

Sure enough, the squad is attacked by mysterious forces once they have entered the tunnel. The evil unleashed turns out to be an army of the undead.

trapped squad resort to black magic gobbledygook – the right mix of ash, turmeric and salt, you see, can thwart the undead where state-of-the-art automatic ammunition fail.

is surprising, considering the show’s creator and co-writer Patrick Graham made the mini horror epic Ghoul a while back.

A contractor named Ajay Mudhalvan (Jitendra Joshi), who cares for money and little else, is out to construct a highway through the jungle. A mysterious, closed tunnel comes in the way, and Mudhalvan needs to destroy it. Local tribals warn him the tunnel is cursed, and venturing in could spell doom. Mudhalvan won’t believe them,

The script tries to make a sociopolitical statement with the way the tribal villagers are treated. For standing up against the construction, they are ruthlessly eliminated and labelled as Naxalites. It is all woven in as a matter of convenience, without as much of an attempt to understand the Naxal movement or its fallout on society.

Forget an overall narrative that might engage, Graham and co-writer Suhani Kanwar struggle even while setting up the primary con ict on which the screenplay tries banking on – between the military squad and an ancient army of zombie British soldiers belonging to the era of Sepoy Mutiny, who emerge from the tunnel once it is opened up.

Clearly, the writers ran out of imagination soon enough. For, having exhausted all military game-plan, the

It gets progressively hilarious as the stage is set for a predictable nal ght between the human and zombie soldiers. When all else fails, the writers resort to overdone blood-soaked mayhem to hammer home some sort of a dazed impact. The utter lack of taut thrills becomes the reason you start feeling disinterested.

Still, Viineet Kumar Singh tries adding as much heft to the show as possible with understated screen presence, as he balances intensity and vulnerability. Manjiri Pupala’s is another impressive act, as the tribal woman Puniya.

For almost every actor playing a human here, the lack of meaty characters (no pun intended) means that they tend to ‘out-zombify’ the cast that plays the undead.

Vinayak Chakravorty