Aranyak review: Raveena Tandon’s web debut leaves you exhausted

Chilly North Indian hill stations with their cool climate and picturesque visuals offer a perfect romantic getaway. But such locations are also an ideal setting for dark crimes. This is what web-show creators seem to believe these days. After the movie Collar Bomb (2021) and the web-series Candy (2021), Netflix's Aranyak is another crime drama set in such a locale.

The story is set in a hill station named Sironah. French tourist Aimee (Anastasiya Hamolka) and the Indian boyfriend Sundar (Ajeet Singh Palwat) of her mother Julie (Breshna Khan) go missing. When Julie arrives at the police station, station house officer (SHO) Kasturi Dogra (Raveena Tandon) is about to proceed on leave for a year to give time to her family and her replacement, Angad Mallik (Parambrata Chatterjee), takes charge. But Kasturi decides to work on the case, much to Angad's annoyance. Kasturi has been waiting for years to get a big case, and hence she doesn’t want to let go this opportunity.

Soon enough, Aimee’s corpse is found hanging from a tree in the jungle nearby. The villagers believe the demon Nar-tendua (half human, half leopard) is behind the killing. Even Kasturi’s father-in-law Mahadev (Ashutosh Rana), a retired police constable, believes this tale. The police, however, rubbish it as a myth.

Meanwhile, there is a political rivalry going on between the cunning minister Jagadamba Dhumal (Meghna Malik) and evil Rajya Sabha member Kuber Manhas (Zakir Hussain), though they never show it openly.

In Hindi films and shows, a male officer and a female officer working closely on a case are generally made to fall in love. Aranyak is a welcome exception to this trend. After their initial conflicts, Kasturi and Angad start respecting each other and become fast friends. But their friendship remains just that.

Tandon and Chatterjee’s fine performances make the gradual friendship that helps the two officers through various ups and downs while solving the case believable.

The show also has good performances from many of its supporting cast like Zakir Hussain, Ashutosh Rana, Meghna Malik, Indraniel Sengupta, Anastasiya Hamolka, Taneesha Joshi, Vivek Madan, Tejaswi Dev and Pratyaksh Rajbhatt.

Aranyak also does well in capturing the location. The visuals are beautiful and the colour grading used suits a show of this nature perfectly.

Beyond the performances and the camerawork, however, Aranyak does not have much going for it. The reason is the screenplay. Right from the first episode, the viewer is presented with too many subplots in a haphazard manner. And as the show progresses, the narrative becomes more convoluted, leaving the viewer confused. It does not help that the story, location and atmosphere are quite similar to those of the Ronit Roy web-series Candy.

The identity of the main culprit is the most crucial part in such crime dramas. But by the time Aranyak reaches its denouement, you have stopped caring who the culprit is because you are bored stiff and exhausted by then.

Aranyak is now available on Netflix.