No, I did not miss the brilliant Suvinder Vicky in the sequel to this absolutely brave and absorbing series. Mona Sona wouldn’t let me. I won’t say she replaces Suvinder. But now Barun Sobti’s junior cop, Amarpal Garundi, reports to Mona Singh’s Dhanwant Kaur, a sullen, deeply wounded, and depressed woman who has husband-issues at home, a murdered woman, Preeti Bajwa, at work.
After the brilliant Daldal, I wasn’t in the mood to see another unsmiling cop for a while. But Mona Singh is a very persuasive actor. She can make us believe in any character she plays. She got me completely invested in Dhanwant’s grief. The performances, especially Mona Singh, Barun Sobti (what an underused performer!), and Pradhuman Singh (who plays Dhanwant’s husband with heartrending resonance), are, in fact, all so uniformly credible, they succeed in camouflaging the flaws in the script.
There is an entire subplot about a boy from Jharkhand (Prayarak Mehta) searching for his missing father, which just doesn’t work. The convenient plotting strategy whereby the migrant’s search ties up with the salient murder mystery is disappointing in a series that otherwise obstinately refuses to take the comfortable way out.
There are some acutely powerful moments in the series, most of them to do not with the police procedural but the two cop-protagonist’s domestic dynamics which are pretty messed up. Co-directors Sudip Sharma and Faisal Rahman negotiate the scrambled characters through their internal trauma with the surety that they will make their way through the crisis, and even if they don’t, they won’t be crushed by adversity.
Garundi’s complicated relationship with his sister-in-law is outed with the cinematic equivalent of a stifled scream. The performances of all four principal protagonists in the Garundi quadrangle are so immersive, it never feels like sleaze, although it had every potential to be just that.
There is a lurking aura of cogency in the proceedings which validates even the flaccid interludes in the plot. Shot in rural Punjab, Kohrra 2 looks and feels disturbingly lived-in. Ishaan Ghosh’s cinematography is atmospherically leaden without seeming over-punctuated. The fact that the characters speak in Punjabi most of the time lends a luminous linguistic urgency to a series that thrives on imminence.
Chillingly, Kohrra 2 starts with a body in a barn and ends right there, making this the most commanding slow-‘barn’ series since Pataal Lok. What happens in between is not always part of the plan. But then the writers (Gunjit Chopra, Diggi Sisodia, Sudip Sharma) know what most of us don’t: God always has other plans.
Two sequences, both featuring Mona Singh, stood out for me. One, when Dhanwant lashes out at her boss when he questions her dedication. Two, when her dead son’s motorcycle is being taken away. It is almost like the closure of the most meaningful part of her life. Kohrra 2 tells us to hold on to what we value.
