Daldal, adapted from Vish Dhamija’s novel Bhendi Bazaar, is a crime thriller created by Suresh Triveni, written with Sreekanth Agneeaswaran, Rohan D’Souza and Priya Saggi, and directed by Amrit Raj Gupta. The seven-episode series on Prime Video revolves around DCP Rita Ferreira (Bhumi Pednekkar), a Mumbai Police officer investigating a serial killer.
Rita is introduced as brooding, humourless and emotionally sealed off. Violent when provoked, shaped by childhood trauma, Rita is also nursing the fallout of a broken engagement.
Her personal history emerges from a fractured childhood marked by single parenting under a frightening mother, Isabel (Vibhawari Deshpande) who, disturbingly, is a cop herself. This backstory hints at psychological complexity, but the series rarely does the work of translating it into behaviour the audience can meaningfully read.
Rita barely speaks and reacts minimally; instead, the viewer is expected to intuit her emotional states without sufficient cues. Her opacity, coupled with rough and mercurial behaviour, makes her unlikeable. This is particularly problematic given that she is the officer in charge of a serial murder investigation.
Police procedure is thin: bodies pile up with an identical modus operandi and a clear signature, yet the police apparatus, especially Rita, fails to recognise obvious patterns or pursue the killer with urgency.
The narrative structure does not help. Like the novel, the show spans multiple timelines, but zigzags between them clumsily. One period inexplicably looks decades older than it should, adding to the confusion. Episode three, titled Janm, is especially jumpy, attempting to address sexual abuse, construct an androgynous character (played by Samara Tijori), and hastily sketch the genesis of a killer’s urge.
Stylistically, Daldal makes baffling choices. The music is frequently intrusive, including a foreign-language track, which clashes with the mood. The use of a radio as a device to dump backstory is ineffective, though the choice of repeating scenes from different perspectives occasionally adds insight.
The show connects more strongly through some of the supporting characters, particularly Aditya Rawal, who plays the troubled and rudderless Sajid with intensity, delivering the most convincing performance in the series.
Tijori brings quiet ambiguity to Anant, even when the writing reduces gender nonconformity to shorthand for psychological disturbance. Geeta Agrawal Sharma’s Sub-Inspector Indu Mhatre emerges as the most well-rounded character.
Daldal clearly wants to be more than a standard serial killer hunt. It aims to explore inherited trauma, moral rot, patriarchy, and navigating a male-dominated crime world. What it delivers, however, is an uneven and often frustrating experience that breaks free of its shaky writing and inert central character only in the final episode.
Ultimately, Daldal feels stuck between ambition and execution. It draws on dark material (trafficking, abuse, cyclical violence) but pares down the investigative rigour and narrative clarity needed for such material to resonate.
