Adhura: Half-Baked Horror Saga Is No School Of Lies

This is #CriticalMargin where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows. Today: Adhura, on Prime Video India.

Poster for Adhura. Prime Video

Some spoilers ahead.

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BAD SHOWS, I have figured, do more than just evoke anger. On a personal level, they force us to question our decision-making skills (“Of all the things we could have watched, we chose this?”); on a philosophical level, they compel us to question our existence (“Given that we will die one day, is this how we choose to spend our limited time?”). And on a human level, they make us better people, nudging us to appreciate good work by highlighting their rarity. While watching Adhura the new show streaming on Amazon Prime, I went through all the three stages and felt profusely grateful to filmmaker Avinash Arun for School of Lies.

To put it simply: Adhura is no School of Lies. This might sound redundant because no two outings are supposed to be alike. But in this case, the argument holds water because they share the basic premise and one tries, subliminally, to be like the other. Adhura is what happens when a child accidentally watches School of Lies misses two episodes and then relays it to their friends, mistaking world-building for mist-covered hill stations.

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Adhura is set in Ooty. In Nilgiri Valley School, a prestigious all-boys boarding school, the dean has died of an alleged heart attack. It was his last day in office. Rumours have spread like wildfire among the children: the man’s ghost, they say, haunts the corridors. But Vedant (Shrenik Arora), a sensitive young boy, is troubled by more corporeal phantoms — the bullies in his class. His quiet disposition provokes them to escalate their torment, going to the extent of locking him inside a cubicle. When the series opens in 2022, the staff in Nilgiri Valley School is busy preparing for the reunion of the 2007 batch.

Written by Ananya Banerjee and directed by Gauravv K Chawla and Banerjee, Adhura straddles between these two timelines. The parallels are plenty. Fifteen years back, a high schooler called Ninad Raman was tortured by his classmates, much like Vedant. Only Adhiraj Jaisingh (Ishwak Singh), an orphan left under the care of his grandfather, saved him. Ninad and Adhiraj were fast friends. One saved and one protected the other. There was a third person in this equation: Malvika Seth (Zoa Morani), Adhiraj’s girlfriend. Being the daughter of a teacher, she was the only girl in the school. On the last day, something happened which altered their interpersonal relationships. The prospect of them meeting again stands on these strenuous ties with Adhiraj nursing decade-long guilt over an incident that involved Ninad.

The show’s similarities with School of Lies are evident — there is a boarding school, a triumvirate comprising two men and a woman, a misfit child who becomes the segue to explore larger narrative themes. There is also a troubled counsellor, Supriya (Rasika Dugal) who uses her profession to come to terms with a personal crisis.

If Arun focussed on the loss of childhood through the premise of a lost child, Banerjee and Chawla tackle issues like bullying, guilt and redemption through the premise of a possessed child. But Adhura is a lesser show, which only gets worse with each episode, for it deals with a world it has no idea about. The boarding school culture, so immersively depicted by Arun, finds no place there. Instead, words like “old boys”, “trustees” are randomly littered in conversations to emphasise familiarity.

Adhura also does not understand the themes at hand nor does it possess the emotional bandwidth or the intellectual capacity to expand on their philosophical underpinnings. Instead, it escalates into an unhinged death fest, unravelling with the aesthetic of a B-grade horror film replete with jump scares and fake blood. It takes no genius to guess what had happened, or what is happening. But the outing meanders for seven long episodes, each approximately 40 minutes long, kills off at least four people too late, and displays shocking insensitivity by the time it concludes.

The treatment is so poor and preoccupied with generating jolts that several scenes in the show, apparently tense, are suspended midway. Like they were inserted with the purpose to evoke dread, and once that is done, they are discarded. Characters are treated no better, none of them are believable. The child actors are predictably unremarkable but it is the adults who are painfully bad.

At one point one of them confesses to having killed someone and the other replies, “I will take care of it” without batting an eyelid. People have talked about the weather with more investment. We see three staff members. One of them speaks in chaste Hindi (Jaimini Pathak does not deserve this), one of them hails from the southern part of India, and the third (Dugal) is a Bengali. Is this a school or a Marvel studio?

By the time the series arrives at the last episode (the longest one), all the wheels come off. A bonkers backstory of a grieving mother is revealed, an occultist arrives from nowhere and Adhura starts invoking spirits with as much randomness as someone ordering pizzas online. Somewhere midway I remember feeling bad for Dugal, a gifted actor in a role that does not justify her caliber. But by the end the only person I was feeling sorry for was myself. Bad shows, I have figured, do more than just evoke anger. They make us contemplative, philosophical and grateful. They also make us existential. As the credits rolled, I remember asking just one question: Why?

(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of OTTplay. The author is solely responsible for any claims arising out of the content of this column.)

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