Swathi (Konkona Sen Sharma) wants to learn how to cook lip-smacking mutton paya soup one day. Starting out as a nurse at a local hospital in Mainjur [a fictitious hill station, we’re told it’s near Madurai], she’s also been nursing her lifelong dream of owning a restaurant while being married to Prabhakar Shetty (Manoj Bajpayee).Prabhakar, or as Swathi calls him, Prabhu – is the black sheep brother of the local mafia boss, Arvind Shetty (a wonderfully foul-mouthed Sayaji Shinde). In a brisk opening scene, it’s established Prabhu and Swathi are passing each other on the downslope of their marriage of two decades. He’s stolen money from his brother to the tune of Rs 30 crore for a business that didn’t work out. So he’s desperate to sell another scheme to him, asking him to invest, so he can find a way to bury his theft into the new venture.Meanwhile Swathi – it is revealed – is having an affair with Prabhu’s masseur, Umesh (also played by Bajpayee, with a squint in his left eye). Hopelessly in love with Swathi, Umesh looks a bit like Prabhu, but nobody really sees it except Arvind, and when the time comes – Swathi.An air of strangeness pervades Abhishek Chaubey’s Killer Soup (co-created with Unaiza Merchant, Harshad Nalwade, and Anant Tripathi) – like a pulp novel adapted by the Coens. The dark comedy is fuelled by the clumsiness of first-time criminals, while some discover how proficient they can be at it.The opening shot of the show, spanning eight episodes with a runtime of over seven hours, is scored with Offenbach’s Barcarolle – the symphony completely at odds with the rolling hills of Tamil Nadu. There’s a falseness in the way the show’s characters refer to each other as “babe”, “jaan” – who probably grew up watching films, where they heard characters with similar social stature using such words. Like how the rich daughter of a certain vintage would waltz into a room screaming “Daddy!” in a time when “Pitaji” was the way to refer to one’s father. In Killer Soup, most of the primary characters seem to be performing while talking to each other. No one is particularly at peace with their place in the world, everyone wants more. Like most of us, even these beings are programmed to overreach. And it’s only then that the soup hits the fan.Chaubey and his co-creators write a busy show, where there are at least a dozen narrative threads emerging from the central crime. Two characters die at the end of the first episode, triggering a thick web of lies, deceit, and blackmail. It’s never really the mystery that is the selling point here, but the audience rooting for our two morally ambiguous anti-heroes, looking to get away with murder, and regretting it more than once.As both Prabhu and Umesh, Bajpayee showcases why he’s one of the most physical actors working today. After Devashish Makhija’s Joram – where Bajpayee’s Dasru primarily depended on his body language to communicate – over here it’s his acid reflux (to avoid eating Swathi’s soup) that is a thing of beauty. As the reluctant Umesh, Bajpayee gives a sensational ode of Lady Macbeth, with guilt and petty jealousy getting the better of him on more than one occasion.Chaubey stacks the supporting cast with excellent names like Shinde, as the senior Shetty brother, incapable of saying a kind word to anyone alive. Nassar is hilarious, as the disillusioned, on-the-cusp-of-retirement cop, Hassan, who rediscovers his sense of duty after meeting a young, diligent cop, Thupalli (Anbuthasan), eager to prove himself. Kani Kusruthi, is very good as the earnest accountant at Prabhu’s company, also a part of the funniest, most unexpected action scene in the show. Anula Navlekar, playing Apeksha, Arvind Shetty’s daughter – who wants to go to a Fine Arts school in Paris, to escape her controlling family — also gets more than one scene to shine. Like Swathi, she isn’t very good at Art, but as long as you can foot the bills of the world, you can continue to delude yourself, the show seems to imply.Another masterstroke is the casting of Lal – as the mysterious Lucas – who, it’s hinted, is a former member of rebel forces, trained in the jungles, capable of carrying out Shetty’s dirty work.Killer Soup, however, belongs to Sen Sharma – an actor who seems to have perfected the art of not doing too much. Like most great actors working, Sen Sharma is poised through most scenes when viewers might be screaming internally. It’s to Sen Sharma’s credit that even though we’re appalled at Swathi’s actions, we never fail to see her desperation to rise above her mediocre life. The way her face contracts after being humiliated by her husband and his elder brother, to scenes where she looks out of her depth carrying out her rookie ransom plans, to scenes where she’s incredibly convincing as an evil mastermind – it’s a performance for the ages. Thereby solidifying the theory that Sen Sharma’s OTT era is one of the most consistent, fertile bodies of work of all time.Chaubey, who has always leaned into genres to tell stories beyond them, is mostly content sticking to the genre mould here. Like last year’s Guns & Gulaabs – which relied on easter eggs and pop-culture references – even Chaubey has his share of fun here. Prabhu’s resort company is called Last Resort, the resort he wishes to build is called Hotel California, also there’s an ingenious needle drop of Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’ – which I last heard during a heist sequence in Pierce Brosnan-starrer, The Thomas Crown Affair (1999). Even in Killer Soup, we’re witnessing a heist, only if new criminals could channel Brosnan’s reel composure. Instead, we get Sen Sharma’s and Bajpayee’s asininity. As Chaubey’s show insists, this is real life after all.
