Gyaarah Gyaarah review: The biggest problem the series has is being unable to conjure up enough fear or menace, give or take a sequence or two. A lot of this show feels like it was constructed on sets.
Based on the 2016 Korean web series ‘Signal’, ‘Gyaarah Gyaarah’ gives us an Uttarakhand-based police procedural featuring characters overlapping in parallel storylines about unsolved murders unspooling over two eras, connected through a supernatural boost.
In a Dusshera mela in Dehradun, a young girl goes missing. Her distraught mother (Gautami Kapoor) never lets the local police forget: fifteen years later, there are no signs of her husband — who behaved like a fumbling extra, unsure of how he needs to act — and she is still waiting to understand exactly what happened that fateful night. But with no leads in sight, the case has long since gone cold. In the best traditions of the genre, a fresh infusion of blood is required in order to blow off dust. The stasis which has senior cop Vamika Rawat (Kritika Kamra) and her reluctant older colleagues in its grip is broken by newbie psychological profiler Yug Arya (Raghav Juyal), who is left gobsmacked when a funnel opens up between him and an investigative cop Shaurya Anthwal (Dhairya Karwa), clearly operating in the past.
Err what? Yeah, exactly. An antique instrument crackles to life at exactly 11.11, becoming the conduit for an exchange of crucial information, and sets things in motion. Skeletons come tumbling out. The forensic team is given additional ammo, and the long-awaited breakthrough occurs. As it does in other baffling mouldering cases the ‘cold case’ team takes up: ding dong, it is gyaarah gyaarah.
The performances are all serviceable, but you wish these characters were given more leeway through smarter writing. Kamra is at her best in the scenes she shares with an elderly time-keeper (Purnendu Bhattacharya), when she doesn’t have to bark instructions or orders at her subordinates, who seem to be at loggerheads for no good reason.