A flaky and unsatisfactory crime drama- Cinema express

Dayaa, the titular protagonist of this series, reminded me for a split second about his namesake from CID, a series only similar in the genre but worlds apart in treatment. CID Daya’s claim to fame is his brawn, particularly useful for kicking doors open. But unlike the more forthright and older Daya, our Dayaa (an affecting JD Chakravarthy) is a timid, hearing-impaired man who works in a port town (Kakinada) and drives a freezer van for a living, ferrying truckloads of fish to parties across the Godavari coast. His wife Alivelu (Eesha Rebba) is heavily pregnant, waiting for him back at home. When Dayaa tells her that the thought of a child like her having a child scares him, you wonder how they ever met, and what their domestic life could have been, considering the age gap. The familial angle succeeds when you judge Dayaa for giving pocket change to three different men when he has a baby on the way. So far, so good. The world you see is affable, agreeable, and filled with characters worth rooting for. But things take a turn for the worse when Dayaa finds a dead body planted in his van. A journalist of repute, she is now in rigor mortis with a bullet wound across her chest. As we dip into the past and wade back to the present, the stakes and the corpses pile up. The freezer van might as well be a closet, and the dead bodies…well, pre-ordered skeletons.

Series – Dayaa
Cast – JD Chakravarthy, Eesha Rebba, Ramya Nambeesan, Kamal Kamaraju, Vishnu Priyaa, Gayathri Gupta
Director – Pavan Sadineni
Streamer – Hotstar

If Dayaa’s world felt real and persuasive, the world of Kavitha (Ramya Nambeesan), who swaps interviewing ministers during election season to supplicate truth from a rape survivor, feels the exact opposite. Plot points — including a sleazy MLA, performative feminism, a marriage broken on the most absurd grounds, and the ethics vs TRP debate in journalism — come forth with as much force and velocity as bullet points do. As Dayaa turns into a fugitive, the plot splinters away in different directions. Suddenly it is four different stories competing for your attention in the twenty-five-minute single episode slot and much like chopped fish, you find neither head nor tails in any. You are never given a chance to invest, to feel, to completely understand why these characters are doing what they are doing. Everything you receive as a viewer is purely what is told to you, a formula that has rarely worked in the favour of any story ever in the history of cinema. There are some tangible stakes in the initial few episodes when Dayaa escapes getting caught by a close shave, but once a major twist arrives around the halfway mark (in an episode titled The Twist), the next set of stakes lose their impact. Corpses are a recurring leitmotif in this series, as are children. If Dayaa is hard of hearing in one ear, on the other hand, we have a mute antagonist on a killing spree. Till the end of the series, we are constantly reminded that there are giant, vicious forces at play, but we never get to know who the real antagonist is. By never giving us enough story on Dayaa’s and Alivelu’s lives, arguably the only exciting subplot of this series — I am forced to concur that the makers of the series are the villains here.

It is amusing to me that a series that has given one little to hold on to for this season, has conveniently shipped off the series’ biggest mystery into the next one. One almost feels baited with Alivelu’s character, which sounds about right (not?) in a series set in the worlds of fishing and yellow journalism. This also leads me to the overall grouse I seem to have lately about OTT storytelling. A particularly bad feature film, for all its limitations, seems endearing in comparison to series’ painstakingly assembled by risk-averse, target audience-vetting productions who are so determined to flatten out the bad — and also the fun, from their stories. Precision and perfection are no fun in the absence of compelling drama. It is also hard to judge something that has worked so hard to not come off as unwatchable, without putting in the gambles necessary to make something great. Dayaa could have used some more thought and breathing space. In retrospect, this would have been a better character-driven drama but ended up as a plot-driven one, for that is what the OTT format demands. But what good is a format, if it works against the viewing experience and not in favour of it?