Gyaarah Gyaarah review: Fresh off the global success of their action thriller Kill, producers Guneet Monga (Sikhya Entertainment) and Karan Johar (Dharma Productions) have joined hands again for a fantasy thriller series. Like the movie, which was inspired from the popular Korean films of the extreme violence genre, their show has also been adapted from a Korean one, Signal (2016). And like Kill, their new collaboration also stars a stellar, immensely watchable Raghav Juyal. 

Time is of essence

Raghav plays Yug, a determined police officer in Dehradun of 2016, who chances upon a walkie talkie at the station which allows him to communicate with Shaurya (Dhairya Karwa), another honest cop from the 1990s. They help each other with leads from their time to solve pending cases. The present informs the past and the past informs the future. The magical minute at which the past and the present intersect is 11:11 pm, a combination made of angel numbers. They only have a minute to communicate. So while the show argues that time is an illusion, for these cops, it still slips by like sand through an hourglass.

Time also bears its weight on the viewers who are required to somehow hold it together and hang in there for the first four episodes. The premise takes too long to set up although the screenplay creates an illusion that a lot is happening at the same time. We've already accepted and processed that the fourth dimension stands fractured by the time our protagonist makes sense of it. The cases he's investigating till then also lack bite. One could argue that the purpose of those episodes is to build intrigue, but there's barely any action to keep us hooked. The terrific fifth and sixth episodes make us overlook what comes before them and wonder if it could've worked better as a movie. But the last two episodes manage to convince us that the premise and characters hold far more possibilities than we initially imagined.

Once Umesh Bisht's direction, and Puja Banerji and Sujoy Shekhar's screenplay, gain enough momentum after the half-way mark, it also gathers more layers. One wonders how the element of time plays out in the realm of law and order and justice. A law is implemented to get rid of criminal cases pending for over 20 years to reduce the burden on the police infrastructure. A cold case department is established to reopen cases with no resolution. An innocent man jailed for 20 years on false charges comes out of jail early due to good behaviour, only to turn into a cold-blooded criminal. And families of victims of murder continue to demand justice after 2 decades although the police has long forgotten about getting them justice. Time may be an illusion on paper, but it entails drastic consequences and endless trauma for those wronged.

Gripping police procedural

Thankfully, the entire appeal of Gyaarah Gyaarah doesn't hinge on the time tweak plot device alone. When it gets going, the show also makes for a gripping police procedural, particularly in the fifth and sixth episodes that revolve around nabbing a resurgent tie-and-die killer who wraps a red dupatta around the hands and legs of their victims after assassinating them. Veteran actor Brijendra Kala steps in for those episodes as a fascinating character torn between being a father and a law-abiding citizen. Umesh and his team go full throttle on those two episodes and make us believe we're sitting on a ticking time bomb that can rupture the space-time continuum.

After his scene-stealing turn in Kill, Raghav Juyal brings his arresting screen presence to a completely different capacity. Here, he plays the moral compass, the beating heart of the show. While his backstory is visited only briefly before the narrative deliberately retraces his steps, he makes us root for him by the virtue of his unabating earnestness and charged quest for justice. He doesn't have the crutches of witty one-liners or grey shades here, which makes it an even tougher job to crack.

It's good to see Kritika Kamra take charge as a fierce cop boss, although she gives a bit of Yami Gautam in a lot of scenes. While she's convincing in the tough cop act, her strength lies in the very few vulnerable scenes. Watch her aching, desperate eyes when she asks Yug to spill the beans on his connection with Shaurya, her former love interest. Or when her boss Shaurya advices her to embrace empathy as a police officer instead of considering it the Achilles heel in a cop's skill set. Dhairya also does well as a short-tempered police officer, but unintentionally or intentionally, is a victim of the time his character represents – remember the one-note hot-headed cop characters of '90s Hindi movies?

More police procedural clichés also slide in to dim the narrative time and again – lines like “Main kisi xyz ko nahi jaanta” by a suspect getting interrogated or desperate cries of help in the form of “koi hai?” by an abduction victim somehow still make it to shows from this genre. Even when doing something new, they keep insulting the audience's intelligence – time stamps pop up to underline whether we're in the past or the present, as if we can't make out on our own. Similarly, actors like Gautami Kapoor are invoked to inject slow, sappy melodrama to otherwise no-nonsense, fast paced thrillers. Maybe the director and writers of Gyaarah Gyaarah needed to hear it from those of a sloppy ‘90s police procedural that they needn’t repeat the errors of judgement their predecessors did back then.

Gyaarah Gyaarah will stream on ZEE5 from this Friday, August 9.