Smita Singh’s Khauf is deeply suspicious of the world around it. In the eight-episode miniseries, spanning five and a half hours, there are only a handful of moments when the bystanders come out looking good (or at least civilised).Nearly all men (boyfriends, colleagues, bus passengers, older relatives, autorickshaw drivers, landlords, streetside louts) vary from being insufferable, creepy and abusive to serial killers; there’s no white knight in this bleak, decaying world. I wouldn’t be surprised if Singh’s show is labelled misandrist or ‘men-hating’ by rungs on social media – like they did with Arati Kadav’s Mrs.Will Singh’s show achieve the ‘virality’ that Kadav’s film did? We’ll find out. But, for Singh’s sake, I do hope it earns some notoriety, because it will mean the show will have pierced through the veneer of smug Indian men, touching a nerve somewhere.Also, I won’t be surprised to find some audiences harping on the ‘not all men’ rhetoric after watching Khauf. It takes the most cursory glances to see how the show is a compilation of crisp, cold 150-word reports buried in the city pages of most leading newspapers: about a shaman who sacrifices young girls to prolong his years. A constable’s son, involved in shady dealings, who went missing a few months ago. A mysterious death in a working women’s hostel.Khauf does a splendid job of tying these incidents together to tell a cogent story – where supernatural horrors effortlessly seep into the everyday physical, verbal and emotional violence inflicted on women in Delhi NCR – along with the rest of the country.Madhuri (Monika Panwar) has just about escaped her hometown Gwalior and moved to Delhi. From the looks of it, she didn’t even wait to finish college, leaving well before she got her degree.In a job interview, her small-town sincerity comes through in an answer when she says her move to Delhi is primarily motivated by her need to be ‘free’.Her picture of Delhi is a sum of her inexperience and rebellion – a place where she can love freely, earn her own money, live without the constant fear of being judged by a relative or family friend, and basically grow a vocabulary to articulate the injustice she’s felt all her life.What Madhuri is about to find out is that metropolitan cities come with their own sets of challenges for Indian women, and that she might have merely moved from a smaller to a bigger, more dangerous prison.Shot by Pankaj Kumar (he also directed the first six episodes) – the man behind Haider (2014) and Tumbbad (2018) – the camera assumes the gaze of men unabashedly leering at the women around them.In the very first scene, Kumar quietly builds up the paranoia, when a woman gets down at a bus-stop and walks down the last mile to her hostel through a slender back alley.He captures Delhi as a post-apocalyptic wasteland, whose noxious air, rotting infrastructure and a hollow value-system has wholly permeated into its unfeeling residents.Singh rounds up a fine ensemble of actors to play her wide array of characters – starting with Panwar, who has proved to be one of the most promising young actors in the Indian OTT space. She plays the traumatised Madhuri with aching vulnerability, constantly second-guessing her instinct.Her co-star from Mast Mein Rehne Ka (2023), Abhishek Chauhan, plays Arun, her lover and possibly her only confidante in the city.The working women’s hostel gives the showrunners an opportunity to bring in a diverse group of actors – Rima (Priyanka Setia), Svetlana (Chum Darang), Komal (Riya Shukla) and Niki (Rashmi Mann).To Singh’s credit, none of these women seem like an item on a checklist; they all have compelling backstories. Komal is a runaway from Bhagalpur, Rima is seeking refuge from her apathetic in-laws living in Noida, Svetlana is trying to eke out an existence while ignoring cat-calls for being a Naga woman in Delhi. Niki, coming from a rich (presumably South Delhi) family, has a stuttering problem – and lives in the hostel because of her dysfunctional dynamic with her family.These are women facing an abrasive city, finding sisterhood and trying to assert their agency.My favourite character in the show is Gracie Dungdung – played by Shalini Vatsa, a break-out in Anurag Basu’s Ludo (2020). Overcoming Hindi cinema’s tradition of intrusive, annoying and barely-human wardens, Singh writes Gracie as a hardened do-gooder. Constantly irritated with the girls and women living in the hostel, Vatsa brings a softer, motherly side to Gracie that she shows rarely.Also, she fearlessly trashes supernatural conversation and doesn’t blink before delivering medicinal truth to those who need it – hinting at a past where she’s had to sever relationships over the years because of her forthrightness. As a result, the hostel is her safe space.She likes to drink in the evenings – with her friend, constable Mishra (Geetanjali Kulkarni) – which is refreshingly depicted without a cloud of judgement.Veterans Rajat Kapoor and Kulkarni reliably bring their A-game to the show, making the world that much richer with many shades of their character.As a mysterious healer in Old Delhi, Kapoor plays the living embodiment of toxic masculinity. With patches on his skin that appear to be rotting, his rhythmic coughs and breathing audibly through his mouth, Kapoor’s pale face and engineered voice reminded me of Peter Stormare playing Lucifer in Constantine (2005) in an all-white attire, with tar dripping from his feet.On the other hand, Kulkarni is brilliant as the mother of a son gone astray, trying to push him in the right direction, pulling him towards her, failing all the same.A special mention for Jeeva (Satyam Sharma), constable Mishra’s son, who delivers his lines with nothing held back. Whether it’s his nagging mother or the girls in the hostel who don’t reciprocate his stalking and harassment, Jeeva is in many ways the human form of a troll in the comments section of a social media platform, voicing his most vile thoughts.For a show as rigorous as this, Khauf also has its share of weak spots. There are moments in the show – like Madhuri choosing the hostel without seeing anything else, which feels a bit rushed. Or the way constable Mishra joins the dots between a murder that took place a few years ago and an anklet she found hidden in her kitchen.The logic behind Madhuri’s possession – turning her into a short-term vigilante in a few scenes – feels a bit convoluted.The VFX also isn’t the savviest we’ve seen on Indian screens recently.However, these are tiny missteps in a show that feels like a triumph of design and atmosphere. Alokananda Dasgupta’s cello-infused score grates away at the dissonance of life as a woman in India, especially when combined with Bigyna Dahal’s eerie sound design.The motifs become a bit heavy-handed towards the end: where the Yamuna river is foamy beyond recognition, hinting at the city’s toxicity at large. Also, the parallels drawn between scorpions and men – it’s their nature.In the climax, a baby girl who was supposed to have been aborted is born, alongside a young girl’s rebirth – who was not supposed to survive her possession by a depraved spirit.These motifs aren’t as chilling as the casual cruelty embedded in dialogue – where three friends argue about a rape allegation over the unconscious body of their victim. “Who cares? It’s her word against ours!” one of the men says, only to be countered with “But what about ‘believe her’? People automatically believe women these days!”If there’s anything Singh’s Khauf exemplifies, it is that Indian women are mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore.Khauf is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.