In Cheekatilo, Sobhita Dhulipala plays a journalist employed by a lowbrow crime channel. Like millions of working women, Sandhya wants more from life, and wants to give back to life more than what she gets.
This sounds like the kind of brief that Satyajit Ray would have given to Madhabi Mukherjee before signing her for Mahanagar. Alas, if looks could kill, Sandhya’s boss would be dead meat. There is so much more to her angst that this series could have explored. Instead, it chooses to make a molehill out of a mountain.
Sobhita playing Sandhya deadpans it all the way. It’s like she is hiding so many truths; her life feels like a lie. Writer-director Sharan Koppisetty takes no risks. He plays it safe all the way. The serial killer route is strewn with clumsy tropes of the genre. Almost every male is a suspect. In what could be the weakest killer thriller in recent times, the plot floodlights every character, as though this is a game of musical chairs.
Finally, when the real killer is revealed, it feels laughably inept. And wildly improbable: apparently, the killer is what he is because an aunt used to “bad touch” him. Poor woman, she probably didn’t know what she was getting into.
Driven by a bumpy plot and actors who seem to have recently acquired a taste for the camera, Cheekatilo feels like a low-budget venture, which it probably is. Sobhitha Dhulipalla is the reason we are supposed to watch this. But she seems disinterested, distant, and absent-minded. The Boyfriend played by Vishwadev Rachakonda is a prop, much like the heroines used to be in the Bachchan starrers, although the female Bachchan here is a bit of a stoic sourpuss.
“We are dealing with a classic serial killer here,” Dhulipalla informs us. We would have never known if she hadn’t told us.
