Inspector Rishi Review: A Slow Yet Alluring Thriller That Questions Faith and Reality

Writer and Director: JS Nandhini

Cast: Naveen Chandra, Srikrishna Dayal, Kanna Ravi, Malini Jeevarathnam, Sunainaa, Kumaravel

Duration: 10 episodes (453 minutes)

Available in: Amazon Prime Video

The romantic partner of a cop is hardly a thing of mystery in Tamil films. She almost always dies, martyred just to be associated with a cop for a husband. Inspector Rishi flirts with the idea, but in the most beguiling way possible — when death occurs, it isn’t just a tool to get the story moving, but an actual detail that leaves us positively terrified. Filmmaker Nandhini JS flings enough surprises at us through the Prime Video thriller to leave us curious, as slow-moving as the ten-episode series can occasionally be. 

The handsomely produced series is set in Thenkadu, a village that constantly struggles to navigate notions of superstition and reality. So, when a wealthy photographer is found dead under a macerating cocoon in a tree, villagers wonder whether it’s cold-blooded murder or the return of Vanaratchi, the twig-crowned spirit goddess of the forest. Even the assembly line of cops and forest rangers summoned to solve the case are an amusing mix of believers and non-believers. Heading this bunch is Rishi (Naveen Chandra), an inspector, who is immediately dismissed as an outsider by Ayyanar (Kanna Ravi) and Chitra (Malini Jeevarathnam), village cops who look at the case with a discerning eye.

Tucked into the corners of this murder mystery is a much more fascinating conservation drama that begs for our attention. Thenkadu is an ecologically sensitive region that is steadily bludgeoned by human intervention — news concerning poaching, illegal slaughter and abuse occasionally reaches our ears even as the series is busy solving murders. Thenkadu’s love for nature is reflected in abundance, particularly through its forest guards. Sathya (Srikrishna Dayal) is an animal whisperer, who feeds snakes and talks to birds when he’s not saving elephants on the clock. Officer Irfan (Kumaravel) and beat ranger Kathryn (Sunainaa) are additions to the show’s forest saviours battling their own problems — in depictions we rarely see with such loving detail in films.  

The show spends enormous amounts of time on each of its eccentric residents — a pleasant surprise in the genre. Rishi isn’t just an inspector with a dead eye and a past, but a past that we’re introduced to in such painstaking detail that we imagine his story as a separate film in our heads. Even the bullet that kills his eye arrives from a state of cosmic brilliance. The same goes for Chitra and Ayyanar, who come to terms with the village’s penchant for superstition and folklore while dealing with their personal demons. But this much detail also comes with a caveat. Inspector Rishi increasingly becomes protracted with every character exposition. From a beat ranger who casually informs us of leaving her infant child with her mother-in-law to be a working woman to a young girl who digs a grave for a Vanaratchi doll, we’re introduced to characters we desperately want to know about, who eventually disappear without a trace.

This also distracts the show from identifying what it actually is — a crime thriller. It takes Rishi and team seven episodes to even draw parallels between murders and another two to chart a basic modus operandi, something that we figured out much earlier. The horror that hits us like a sledgehammer in the first few episodes — look out for the superbly designed scene with a pregnant woman walking back home in the dead of the night — too tapers out as the show moves on. This is also because the show marches on to actual real-life horrors such as homophobia, animal abuse and tribal relocation. Even if the transition might not be smooth, Inspector Rishi keeps us thoroughly hooked, as frayed as the wire can often be.