Rahul Desai
Despite its talented cast led by Vijay Raaz and Ashutosh Rana, the series feels like a lost opportunity. To call it a lost opportunity is an understatement. To call it a cinematic crime would be an exaggeration.
Every second show is an investigative thriller these days. You know the drill. The whodunit is the body and the social commentary is the soul. The padding – the personal lives of the police, the societal rot, the domestic conflicts, the little narrative offshoots – is the point of the plot.
But the padding in Murder in Mahim, a long-form adaptation of Jerry Pinto’s crime novel of the same name, has a problem. You can tell that most moments are artificially inflated; a two-line exchange is stretched to 20 just because it’s an eight-episode story.
The deeper they delve into the case, the more enlightened they become. But their transformation is anything but subtle. At times, it’s like someone is killing people solely to educate the boomers (how twisted-cool a premise is that?).
The satisfaction, for the viewers, comes from the ability to identify and decode these quiet themes. Murder in Mahim literalizes its commentary. Even a dying man breaks into a rant about regret, hypocrisy and Indian society.
Murder in Mahim is not unwatchable, but it fumbles the fundamentals of its genre. It mistakes slow-burning for slow. If it were an Indian batsman, it would be criticized for its strike-rate – in Test cricket no less.