‘Eleven Eleven’ series review: Medium crime thriller bides its time

Raghav couple in ‘Eleven Eleven’

eleven elevenAvailable on ZEE5 and adapted from a Korean series SignalIt is a gloomy, lifeless kind of time-warp thriller. Jumping across timelines, director Umesh Bisht always takes care to hold his audience’s hand. Monotonous letters appear on the screen to indicate the exact date, year, location. Lest we lose our senses, the pop-culture references are even more explicit: Heart For 1990, Kapoor And Sons for 2016. It’s a fairly unimaginative way of summoning a period, evoking a mood. It’s different from that scene Back to the future Where the 1950s Doc exclaims to Marty, who’s back from the ’80s, in surprise, “Ronald Reagan! The actor?! Then who’s the vice president? Jerry Lewis?”

The case of the kidnapping and murder of a little girl in Dehradun has remained unsolved for years. Inspectors Vamika (Kritika Kamra) and Yug (Raghav Juyal) have only a few days to catch the culprit; if they fail, the upcoming deadline will bring closure to such unsolved cases. While working on the case one night, Yug comes across an old walkie-talkie that mysteriously turns on. On the other end is Shaurya (Dhairya Karwa), a police officer in 2001 who was investigating the same case. He says Yug has given him a clue, and calls their conversation a “transmission.” Slowly, with a mix of surprise and panic, Yug realises they can work together.

Unfortunately, after this promising setup, the show steadily loses its momentum. The series of cases that Yug and Shaurya tackle together fail to become interesting beyond a point.Is that why they remained unresolved in the first place? I was thinking idiotically). Despite the constant pacing – and some skillful use of parallel editing in fast scenes – the narrative wilts and becomes slack. Beist’s presentation of the setting and characters lacks the lively quality he brought to his previous feature, Tragic Comedy. PagglaitEra, despite having an alleged M.A. in psychology, is not the most reliable of criminal profilers. “Psychopathic people are narcissists. They don’t care about pets,” he declares at one point. Right. Tell that to the Nazis.

A scene from ‘Eleven Eleven’

This probably wouldn’t be considered a criticism, since one character explicitly describes time as an ‘illusion’, but eleven eleven As a streaming series, it feels dated. It comes from religion and Sikhism, the twin forces behind recent action series StrikeThis is perhaps the biggest mystery to be solved. Except for its central idea – its seeds are hidden in an American sci-fi film frequencyAnd Anurag Kashyap also tried something similar again – There’s not much else in this show to recommend it other than it being no different than countless thrillers that take place in hillbilly towns, with killers in hooded jackets and forensic experts saying, “It’ll take time…”

Kamra’s strong performance is undermined by a shaky screenplay; this series has a tendency, not uncommon in web shows, to waste resonance for quick dramatic gain. Both Juyal and Karwa are fine leads: the latter, playing an uncontrollable angry girl, has an imposing physical presence. However, my eyes kept lingering on a minor character at the edges of the frame. If nothing else, eleven eleven This will be a sweet farewell for Nitish Pandey. khosla’s nest The actor passed away last year. Here, he plays Balwant, a samosa-eating police officer who starts to like his job. Pandey looked like a simpleton in every scene, always prepared, observing the world around him with wonder. With a calm manner befitting his characters, he will always be missed.

Eleven Eleven is streaming on ZEE5