If Kankhajura’s dark sinister criminal mood flows by like a breeze in spite of eight episodes, it is for Roshan Matthew, that chameleon-like Malayalam actor (have you seen his work in his native tongue, if not then about-time you did) who transforms in front of our incredulous eyes into a severely traumatized borderline-psychotic, kind gentle naïve yet devious man named Ashu who seeks only one thing in life: validation from his brother Max, played effectively by Mohit Raina.
Very rarely are we forced to wonder what a film/series would be like without an actor: Dilip Kumar in Devdas, Shabana Azmi in Arth, Kamal Haasan in Hey Ram…
Add Roshan Matthew to this rarefied roster. Were it not for Roshan, Kankhajura would collapse like a house of ‘cads’ and I do means cads. The characters including Matthew and Raina, have a mean streak running through their lacerated souls. Max’s business buddies played by the redoubtable Ninad Kamath and Mahesh Krishna Shetty are various degrees of nasty depending on which way the wind blows. The latter even takes a leak on a victim’s face. Not a nice man to know.
Even the women aren’t immune from a smattering of spite. Veteran Usha Nadkarni has a whole lot of fun with her role, reminiscent of Shabana Azmi in the recent Dabba Cartel, as a dreaded crimelord.
Heeba Shah is a whole lot of steely will as a hardnosed cop, who seems to nurture Ashu’s slow burn intensity, but she too has her own agenda. Even Max’s genteel wife (Sara Jane Dias) secretes some not-so-pleasant surprises for her male counterparts.
Taking hold of the core of the original characters from the Israeli series Magpie, director Chandan Arora and his co-writer Upendra Sidhaye construct a curious kingdom of white-collar crime, governed by surreptitious self-gratification.
There is an unusual level of layering and subtexts in the storytelling, easy to miss on a medium as casual as the OTT. So if you are one of those viewers who saunter in and out, this series might be problematic.
As mentioned even before, the actors iron out the rough edges; the series retains the basic emotional core of two brothers, polarized and traumatized by their individual circumstances to the point of becoming adversaries.
Interestingly, Roshan Mathew and Mohita Raina play off each other with a sense of guilelessness, as though they don’t know where the sibling relationship is heading. There is a feeling of relentless dread cutting through the plot.
That the series is located in Goa is a happy coincidence: the palm trees, beaches, the ancient heritage homes and quaint cottages lend an alluring mystery, far deeper than what the characters collectively convey.
Ideally, Kankhajura should have found its home on the big screen where the articulate frames would have whispered about the mysteries that we can only imagine on the home medium.
Kankhajura has its dosage of deficits. Some of the action in the closing episodes looks stagey and tacky, and one involving gas cylinders is an embarrassment. But with Roshan Mathew’s OTT-defining performance—yes, we have not seen anything like this on any streamer–the series holds together very ably. As far as slow burn crime dramas go, this one scorches.
