May 26, 2020
Paatal Lok – season 1
Creator: Sudip Sharma
Genre: Drama
Certification: India: 18 (self-applied)
Language: Hindi
Certification: India: 18 (self-applied)
Language: Hindi
Release date: May 15, 2020
Paatal Lok is presently streaming on Amazon Prime
“The show attempts to explore rage as an outlet for both the powerful and the impotent, struggling to express themselves… Violence may take different forms but power flows in the same directions. Sharma sets up a brooding world but the patterns of evil-versus-eviller get repetitive and the grimness, tedious.”
Raja Sen, Live Mint
“After I had watched all the nine episodes of Paatal Lok, I tweeted that Banerjee’s performance had scared the hell out of me. He responded laughing and then added, ‘I have already told my wife not to watch it.'”
Aseem Chhabra, Rediff
“The key pieces are laid out upfront. They are familiar. The neo-noir crime drama… dredges its way into the dregs of a netherworld.”
Rating: 4 stars | Full review
Saibal Chatterjee, NDTV
“Paatal Lok is certainly an important chronicling of the hellish journey of small-town characters who lived to tell the tale.”
Rating: 3.5 stars | Full review
Priyanka Sinha Jha, News 18
“We are led inexorably into darkness, which gets darker at each step: there are some parts here, doused in blood and bone and gristle, making even the most hardened fans of gore wince. I confess to closing my eyes in a couple of scenes, but the violence isn’t gratuitous because it has history: we know there will be blood.”
Rating: 3.5 stars | Full review
Shubhra Gupta, Indian Express
“It’s titled Nether World, for God’s sake. It shines a torchlight on a dark India we often read about… It exposes the gutter, and leaves you feeling gutted too.”
Rating: 4 stars | Full review
Mayank Shekhar, Mid Day
“Paatal Lok is a tightly knit thriller with every episode ending on a cliffhanger, which forces you to keep bingeing. The suspense doesn’t flag but our perception of the characters shifts as the story unravels so that it becomes impossible to decide the good, bad and ugly. Paatal Lok means underworld so it would be futile to look for a moral center but what little goodness there is resides mostly in women, children and dogs. It’s telling that Haathi Ram is named after an animal. There is little humanity in the humans here.”
Anupama Chopra, Film Companion
“Paatal Lok successfully converges a plethora of socio-political and cultural issues that plague the modern Indian society with a very realist aesthetics. Its plotline brilliantly weaves multiple tensions around the lines of caste, class and gender discrimination in addition to highlighting issues of youth cultures and struggles and aspirations of middle-class families.”
Kunwar Nitin Pratap Gurjar, Youth Ki Awaaz
“Densely packed social dramas tend to use a genre device – murders, manhunts, terrorist plots – to convey a broader picture of the other India. The protagonist’s journey enables the writing to expand on deep-rooted themes of poverty, caste, Islamophobia, victimisation and gender oppression. Paatal Lok goes one up, or down, by using a protagonist who seems to realize that his own journey through the trenches is a sweaty distraction from an ominously distant conspiracy. An outstanding Jaideep Ahlawat plays Hathi Ram Chaudhary like a man who knows he is sifting through the wreckage of collateral damage.”
Rahul Desai, Film Companion
More excerpts & links from film reviews by Ajit Duara | Anna MM Vetticad | Ashameera Aiyappan | Baradwaj Rangan | Jayashree Chakravarti | Johnson Thomas | Karan Bali | Kennith Rosario | Mayank Shekhar | Mihir Fadnavis | Nandini Ramnath | Piyasree Dasgupta | Rahul Desai | Raja Sen | Rajeev Masand | Rajesh Kumar Singh | Ranjib Mazumder | Saibal Chatterjee | Sankhayan Ghosh | Saumil Gandhi | Shoma Chatterjee | Shubhra Gupta | Sowmya Rajendra | Sreehari Nair | Sukanya Verma | Suparna Sharma | Tanul Thakur | Uday Bhatia | Velu Nair
Paatal Lok on IMDB
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