More of the same, and yet at the top of the game… That just about sums up the fourth season of this well-played cat-and-mouse crime thriller about a super-rich wedding, a murder, and the affluent arrogance of a family that thinks crime is the only way to stay wealthy.
It’s a world where people get shot randomly, remorselessly. The patriarch of the family (Harsh Chhaya, over-the-top) is a drunken lout whose empirical viciousness is manned and powered entirely by his wild nephew Rinku (Surya Sharma, brilliant) .
Rinku remains as interesting in Season 4 as he was the first time around. He is rough, rude, violent, and unstoppable. The gentle side emerges willy-nilly in a series that has no room for emotions.
This time around, there are some elegant ladies on the wrong side of the law who die brutal deaths. This is no country for women. And yet they exist in this toxic masculine world, sometimes coexist. For a series about toxic masculinity, the women in Undekhi have a lot to do, and not much of it is legal or legit.
Director Ashish R Shukla just about succeeds in holding this irrevocably immoral world together. A lot of the writing here involves physical action. And yet a sluggishness seeps into the storytelling that luckily doesn’t storm into a state of exhaustion . The characters are never allowed to get lazy, although the writing occasionally does.
Undekhi is about the arrogance of wealth. This affliction makes the Atwal family believe no law of the land is applicable to their lives. Convinced of their invincibility, they go about killing, maiming, grafting , etc., with no fear of God or Law. The sprawling space is not wasted for even a minute.
New characters are brought into play in Season 4, but never are they superfluous. Shukla employs the less-is-more mode of narration. This is unusual in crime dramas, especially one that is now into its fourth season. Miraculously, it never seems as if Undekhi has overstayed its welcome.
Undekhi is a mirror of our times. It sometimes reaches dead ends in its plot construction, but the writers expertly steer the plot out of sticky situations. They know better than the characters that, much as we’d like, good guys don’t always win. There is not a single character in this series that I would like to run into at a party. But heck, I sure don’t mind running into them again on screen.
