Barzakh review: Asim Abbasi returns to Zee Zindagi four years after his gripping crime thriller Churails. He pulls off a casting coup by getting Fawad Khan and Sanam Saeed to reunite 11 years after their popular romantic drama Zindagi Gulzar Hai. But in this folk fantasy, they aren't paired together. They play unlikely companions on a spiritual journey. But the journey is so fettered with its own excesses that it becomes increasingly strenuous to comprehend and appreciate what Asim is going for here.

Stuck in limbo

The story is set in the Land of Nowhere, a valley presumably in Pakistan, where Jafar Khanzada (Salman Shahid), a wealthy patriarch, invites his estranged sons to partake in his third wedding. They're his kids from the first wedding, but that's not the only reason why they're awkward. Jafar is now getting married to his first love Mahtab, who died decades ago, but he's determined that she still exists… on the other side. Non-believers like his younger son Shahryar (Fawad) dismiss the event, while his caregiver Scheherezade (Sanam) implores us to have faith in the unknown.

That's what the director does too, by engulfing the narrative in a supernatural embrace. There are fairies with rocks tied to their backs that weigh them down, instead of wings that give them flight. There's a tree of life (or death?), the stem of which rips apart upon any cosmic turbulence. And there's a mysterious woman who keeps painting and gifting guests' deepest darkest secrets to them. And if these visual clues weren't enough, Asim gift-wraps the show with quotes from the Book of Nowhere in Rumi-like font, a voiceover emanating like it's from the grave, and certain know-it-all characters enunciating like they're reading out listlessly from a snail-speed teleprompter.

The treatment proves to be more of a hindrance than an aid to the storytelling. It's amply evident that Asim is trying to paint a Pakistani/South Asian folk fantasy counterpart of Ari Aster's Midsommar (2019), but the visual imagery isn't as strikingly original as the Florence Pugh-starrer. I still can't forget the image of floral creepers almost engulfing her character. Unfortunately, there's no such cinematic sorcery at play here. Mo Azmi's cinematography milks the stunning locations – the pink sky, the amber leaves, and the expansive mountains are subtle reminders that there's something larger at play. But the stakes are always communicated by talking down to us. As if it's a riddle that we can't solve not because we're trying, but because they refuse to give us enough clues in the first place.

Characters > Worldbuilding

Barzakh would've been a far gripping series had it not allowed the worldbuilding to consume the fairly fascinating characters. Salman Shahid lends a distinct dismissive and arrogant streak to the patriarch Jafar that he comes across as a man who may have been shielding his brute force with his obsession with first love. Or he loved so deeply that he can't help but hate with the same intensity when that love is taken away prematurely. When he says, “Mujhe pyar karna aata hi nahi hai” (I don't even know how to love), you hard agree, but also wish he'd have lived a less harsh life.

Fawad Khan's Shehryar is the typical rebellious son who vows never to follow in his emotionally unavailable father's footsteps, only to overcompensate with his son to eventually become the same as his old man. Again, the actor brings truckloads of empathy and a deep-seated pain to his portrayal that every time you see him unravel, you want to give him a reassuring hug. There's also his elder brother, who keeps his life aside to take care of his ailing mother, but gets frustrated to the point that he stuffs food into her mouth when she refuses to eat. The very same frustration is echoed by Shehryar's wife, an unwilling mother, who imposes the caregiving on her toddler son out of postpartum depression.

Barzakh touches upon these everyday themes of the burden of caregiving, the cyclic nature of parenting, and the curbing of sexuality with a sensitive touch. But they're beaten down by its lofty ideas of life, death, afterlife, and balance of the universe. Sure, the supernatural would've made for a new way to tell the same old story in a fresh format instead of going the slice-of-life route. But it's hurled like an attack on the audience's intelligence rather than applied like a sound narrative device. Even the cringe but funny death jokes cracked by Fawad and his son's characters would've sufficed. For those tell us that we need not take death seriously, but also remind us that we can't brush it under the carpet either. Asim Abbasi could've approached Barzakh more with this telling lightness of touch instead of the manufactured heavy-handedness. By trying to straddle the two, he just makes his storytelling invariably stuck in limbo.

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