Prathyush Parasuraman
The final resting pose of Aarya, one foot on the chest of the demon like Mahisasuramardhini, folding Hindu iconography into her pant-suit-ification, is a powerful image that comes after a strange shootout, where swords that become the weapon of choice
Aarya’s children are now older — Veer (Viren Vazirani), Arundhati (Aarushi Bajaj), and Aditya (Pratyaksh Panwar), each burdened by their own psychological torment.
Aarya has so much main character energy that the show slackens when it turns its gaze away from Aarya, because only she is allowed complexity — to be both “majboor” and “mahaan”, to be a “bali” and to make a “balidaan”.
Often in Aarya there is the sense that there are two shows that are running parallel, drawing from two distinct — perhaps, even mutually exclusive, but certainly distinct — schools of filmmaking: Hyperbolic melodrama and invasive realism.
Show creator Madhvani and cinematographer Kavya Sharma use cinematography to hew space with action and personality. It’s as though a camera has been suspended, dangling impatiently in the midst of a room chafing against the surface of the score, like sandpaper.
The descent, at once steep, at once tragic, into a final season, is palpable, where episodes cling with desperation to that one tense, densely dramatic moment towards its end, where the end of the show and the drawing of the curtains on this show feels more like relief than longing.