Kohrra is much ado about very little

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What starts off as a simple discovery of a dead body by a young man who is having sex with his girlfriend in the open fields of Jagrana in Punjab soon escalates into a hi-profile and hyped murder case. So far, so good.

The dead man is Paul (Vishal Handa), a Sikh who stays overseas and had come to his hometown to get married. His best friend, Liam (Ivantiy Novak) is also missing since his death. What’s more, Paul’s throat has been slit, but as the coroner reveals, that was not the cause of his death. He had been repeatedly bludgeoned with a heavy stone.

Into the vortex of this murderous mess land sub-inspector Balbir Singh (Suvinder Vicky) and his assistant, Garundi (Barun Sobti), both of whom have, incidentally, many personal crosses to bear in their home relationships. As they get deep into the investigation, multiple angles surface—Paul’s cousin, Happy (Amarinder Pal Singh) is unhappy that his father, Maninder (Varun Badola) does not consider him of any worth and admires Paul, so Happy had a motive: hatred. Maninder and brother Satwinder (Manish Chaudhari), Paul’s father, have a land dispute going. Then there is a truck driver, who has seemingly violent tendencies, a drug addict and wannabe rapper, Sakaar (Saurav Khurana) who loves the girl, Veera (Aanand Priya), who was engaged to Paul. There is another truck driver, Pramod Kumar (Sumit Gulati) who is a suspicious character.

Balbir and Garundi have their family lives in turmoil and Liam’s mother (Rachel Shelley of Lagaan fame) is another anguished soul. Then there are the diktats issued by Balbir’s boss, Sikka (Sudeep Singh) and more.

The net result is a complex thriller that looks at tumultuous human relationships, only to end in the one solution that is the bane of so many web series trying to go ‘contemporarily global’ in appeal: homosexuality! More, the series revels in being ominously dark and needlessly violent.

Many a dramatic angle peters off into essentially mundane or uneventful conclusions. There is also repeated brutality and gore, and some of the worst background scoring we can hope for in a web series—a relentless drone. The angles shown of Balbir’s and Garundi’s lives only end up stretching the already plodding narrative rather than making it gripping or offering riveting insights into the complexities of a policeman’s lives. The almost 300-minute marathon (six episodes of a minimum 45 minutes) is thus a drag, and lacks the pace and interest quotient that such police-based series have when well-written and well-made..

Of course, all the actors do rise to the occasion, and I must single out Suvinder Vicky, Barun Sobti, Ekavali Khanna as the wife of a slain cop, Harleen Sethi as Balbir’s daughter, Aanand Priya as Veera and Saurav Khurana as Sakaar.

But overall, something is missing. Sadly, this has been a recurrent factor with even the slightly better offerings of Clean Slate that is into movies and the web. Time, perhaps, to really clean the slate!

Rating: **

Netflix presents Clean Slate Filmz’ Kohrra  Created & written by: Gunjit Chopra, Sudip Sharma & Diggi Sisodia  Produced by: Rohit Jayaswal Directed by: Randeep Jha  Music: Benedict Taylor & Naren Chandavarkar  Starring: Barun Sobti, Suvinder Vicky, Rachel Shelley, Harleen Sethi, Manish Chaudhari, Amaninder Pal Singh,  Saurav Khurana, Vishal Handa, Ivantiy Novak, Samuel John, Varun Badola, Aanand Priya, Arjuna Bhalla, Ekavali Khanna, Amaninder Pal Singh, Zubin Mehta, Gantavya Sharma, Lakha Singh, Sumit Gulati, Veerpal Kaur Gill, Navdeep Singh, Jagga Singh, Sudeep Singh, Vikas Neb, Lokesh Bhatta & others