Murder by the Sea: Dutt directorial drowns in deep sea!

A high-profile Bengali businessman gets murdered in Puri. Incidentally, the body is discovered by none other than a crime fiction writer.

But hang on! Christmas has not come early to turn Puri a Hatyapuri, and the abovementioned writer is not named Lalmohan Ganguly. It is rather a fictional famous female fiction author, who has already been fighting with her own demons from a traumatic childhood event.

By forgetting that nightmarish chapter of her life, can she gather enough strength to come out as a real-life detective herself and unearth who murdered the businessman, and why?

Essentially this is the basic plot of the new Hochoi Original Series ‘Murder by the Sea’, created by acclaimed Indian musician and filmmaker Anjan Dutt, that goes on to explore many more subplots and shades of human psychology in the process, before reaching a certain climax full of twists and turns to put the likes of Abbas-Mustan in shame.  

‘Murder by the Sea’ is not a sequel to Dutt’s debut web series ‘Murder in the Hills’ from the previous year. But one probably can say, it is the second installment of Dutt’s ‘Murder’ franchise, that might get more volumes in the coming years, in the form of ‘Murder in the Mid-sea’, ‘Murder in the Forest’, ‘Murder in the Plainlands’ and so on. 

But halfway through the current series, the popular feelings generated must be that it should have been named ‘Pistol by the Sea’ instead, as it looks like almost every single character is wandering around the city and the shore, carrying a firearm, and even opening it from time to time. 

The ensemble cast of the series consists of Ananya Chatterjee, Anjan Dutt, Arjun Chakrabarty, Paayel Sarkar, Trina Saha, Suprobhat Das, Sujan Mukherjee and Rupankar Bagchi in titular roles.

Like a classic murder-mystery, everyone has a motive to kill the businessman. But things start to get even more interesting when some of the suspects also get assassinated.

While this series does not have many similarities with its half-brother from 2021, one thing has remained constant, that the series being extremely and unnecessarily slow and sluggish. And so sloppy the screenplay is that the term ‘slow-burner’ is also not enough to compensate for the boredom it evokes in one’s mind.

Apart from Trina Saha and Rupankar Bagchi, every actor is professional and vastly experienced to leave no room for complaint as far as their individual performance is concerned. Both Saha and Bagchi looked novice as compared to their co-artists. Especially, Bagchi should have done much better, given the fact that he had a very key role to play in the story.  

It is really nice to see the national award winner Ananya Chatterjee as the protagonist of a web series with such a large canvas. She seized the opportunity to perfection, making the character suffering from bipolar disorder look believable yet not uninteresting. Her chemistry with both Anjan Dutt and Suprobhat Das was a delight to watch.

The brilliant Arjun Chakrabarty also held onto his own in spite of a jam packed cast. Paayel Sarkar, as mostly seen in recent years, did not get to play a principal part in this series as well. Given the calibre this actor possesses, she deserves to be portrayed more prominently.

Sujan Mukherjee can claim the same, while Suprobhat Das seems to be improving and becoming a fan-favourite with every other flick.

As hinted earlier, the story is the biggest minus of the series, which otherwise is technically sound and satisfactory. There were a lot of complaints in regards to ‘Murder in the Hills’ as well, but beyond any reasonable doubt, this one has fared worse in the story writing discipline. And a poorer screenplay is also the child of the lack of a proper story.

As opposed to the first seven episodes, the eighth and final one tried to tell and explain a lot, but the story had already lost its track and tone by that time, so nothing was really enough to awaken the already-dead. Besides, the explanations also looked and sounded rather vague, inviting more questions than answers.

Anjan Dutt has a very talented crew to his assistance, be it in music, cinematography or editing. As a result, everything seemed near-perfect or at least decent from the surface level, but nothing was extraordinary to be remembered.

As Dutt is the ‘creator’, the captain of the ship, he has to shoulder the allegations of his ship drowning in the open ocean.