Bullet Point Review: Afsos
Published in
3 min readApr 14, 2020
- Afsos has one wacko premise — Nakul (Gulshan Devaiah permeating irritation and resignation into every bit of his body) wants to end his life. We meet him as he is lying on the railway track, waiting for the train to run over him — his eleventh attempt at killing himself. Unfortunately (or fortunately), someone saves him every time, and ironically that stranger dies in the attempt to save him. So he seeks help, first with a therapist (an effective Anjali Patil), and when that doesn’t help, then at an (ingenious) start-up of sorts, aptly named Emergency Exit, run by Maria (an exceptional Ratnabali Bhattacharya), who consults and discusses various methods of suicide, with a friendly demeanor and ease with which you would discuss the weather. Options include strangulation, shooting, or jumping off the cliff, she says with such a warm radiance, it’s like discussing your majors with your school counselor, before heading off to college.
Nakul decides to get shot, on the head, in his house — each point every specifically asked about, and his contract is given to Upadhyay (an enigmatic Heeba Shah) a hitwoman who paints, listens to Beethoven, and has never failed in getting the job done. She shows up at a client’s funeral, just to shoot him, who is already lying dead in the coffin, regretting that they didn’t get to meet earlier. But with Nakul, he escapes her bullet, not once but twice, and by then, the near-death experience fires up a desire in him to live. Thus begins a cat and mouse chase, between a woman who must kill and a man who wants to live.
- The trailer had me thinking that this was all there is to the plot, but Afsos goes an unexpected route with the inclusion of a hunt for an immortal man with an immortality elixir, Himalayan sadhus and Russian gangsters. This is hardly a problem because the show still remains entertaining but with compelling characters like Shloka, Maria, and Upadhyay, I wouldn’t have minded a longer runtime or more seasons, especially with each of them having so much to unravel.
- Now more than ever with talks about mental health, suicide, and depression being openly spoken about, the writers (Dibya Chatterjee, Anirban Dasgupta, Sourav Ghosh) ran a high risk of many of the jokes ending up as crass. The writers tackle this by deriving the humour from the situation, and not the characters, like Nakul ending up halfway across the state due to mixup, or Maria literally pushing her clients to their deaths from the cliffside from where she operates from (I hadn’t laughed out this hard since watching Tabu’s character push her neighbour granny off the balcony in Andhadhun).
- Afsos is both rooted in reality and the mythical. If you have a woman running an ‘assisted suicide’ service from a van at the edge of a barren cliff, and a Himalayan sadhu in search of an immortal man, you also have two painters conversing about payments high up on a frail wooden scaffolding, men playing cards by the river shore, and a shootout so unconvincing, it is a miracle that it ends with the bad guys getting caught. Through this, the show is able to touch upon themes such as the purpose of living, death, and the concept of immortality. Death for Maria and Upadhaya is their livelihood, and for the painter who falls to his untimely death, it brings in more money for his family than he did when he was alive. For Nakul, evading death ironically gives him a purpose in life, and the quest for the immortal man, instead of solving all the problems, only raises more questions on its necessity, and if it indeed is boon or a bane.
On those account Afsos largely has renewed my faith in stories that can incorporate our (Indian) mythology into a modern-day tale, without resorting to unintentionally funny CGI or a meandering storyline.
