Cast: Mona Singh, Barun Sobti, Rannvijay Singh & others
Creator: Sudip Sharma
Director: Sudip Sharma and Faisal Rahman
Streaming On: Netflix
Language: Punjabi, Hindi, English, Telugu, Tamil
Runtime: 6 episodes of 45 minutes each
What does Punjab bring to your vision – sprawling Sarson ke khet, a woman with a colorful chunni running through those fields with her hair beautifully tied in a paranda. A colorful juti completes the look, and probably a dhol beat in the background. This picture-perfect image was brutally shattered by a few films in the last decade, with Udta Punjab leading the lot. Kohrra season 2 brings back the haunting lanes of Punjab and the unsettling stories that are hidden in these lanes!
The writing team of the show, Gunjit Chopra, Diggi Sisodia, and Sudip Sharma, has created a world that is powerful. In fact, powerful is an understatement for the level of the layered writing this season of the show targets! There is a crime at the center, but as the fog begins to thin, we find stories buried and stories that would make you breathless!
Kohrra: Season 2 Review: What’s It About:
Kohrra Season 2 shifts the fog to a darker corner of Punjab, as it investigates the murder of an NRI girl, Preet Bajwa, who is a social media influencer and returns to India to live with her family, and wants a divorce from her husband. The story weaves together a brutal murder with the systemic rot of society, proving that Kohrra isn’t just in the weather, but in the hearts of the people involved.
Kohrra: Season 2 Review: What Works:
The dialogues and the narrative don’t spoon-feed the audience; it respects your intelligence to pick up the topics it highlights, and it leaves you with haunting afterthoughts! Kohrra Season 2 is a brutal critique of regional dynamics. It moves beyond the drug menace trope and looks at industrial exploitation on an urgent basis with Prayark Mehta’s arc. He plays a boy from Jharkhand, trying to find his father, who has been missing for almost 2 decades! His arc makes you cry and get angry at the same time – you question the system that is so broken that it protects the powerful and crushes the weak! The show treats the migrants from UP, Bihar, and Jharkhand, not as props, but as the heartbeat of the tragedy. The zero progress and the inhumane approach to their stories will make you go numb!
Kohrra: Season 2 Review: Star Performance:
As Barun Sobti returns as Garundi, the emotional anchor this time is Mona Singh. The story unfolds in layers – the plight of bonded labor and the Exploitation within the industrial belts, patriarchy, Stockholm syndrome, alcoholism, male-female dynamics at the workplace, and more. Sudip Sharma and his team of writers dodge the ‘sequel curse.’ They establish the second season on the exact tone of the first one – dark, gritty, fast paced, but they expand the world, with every character and their back stories. The script brilliantly uses a murder investigation to peel back layers of grief, regional dynamics, and the cycle of poverty. It’s less about ‘who killed whom’ and more about how a society fails its most vulnerable. The dialogue remains rooted, gritty, and unapologetic.
Mona Singh delivers one of her career best performances that is quiet, restrained yet explosive, portraying a woman caught in the crosshairs of a personal tragedy with a haunting vulnerability, but still excelling professionally! Barun Sobti as Garundi carries the baggage of the previous season while showing a mature side that outgrows his impulsive nature in the first season!
Punjab, as a character, impresses the most in Kohrra season 2. You can almost feel the darkness of Punjab and the suffocating tension while Dhanwant Kaur and Garundi investigate a chilling murder case. The show starts as a crime thriller but like its last season it quietly turns into a very chilling social drama. It is a commentary on the societal evils Punjab is still fighting. While most thrillers focus on whodunnit, Kohrra season 2 focuses on the why! It understands that a murder is rarely just an act of violence; it is the culmination of years of systemic failure, repressed trauma, and societal rot.
Kohrra: Season 2 Review: What Doesn’t Work:
The only thing that might be a bummer for this season is the detailed storytelling about every character. There are too many of them to remember their back stories! Every episode starts with a flashback, and you might have a problem joining the dots with this non-linear storytelling!
Kohrra: Season 2 Review: Last Words:
The series serves as a violent deconstruction of the Yash Chopra version of Punjab. There are no vibrant mustard fields here. Instead, we see the grey smoke of chimneys and the rusted gates of godowns. It highlights a Punjab struggling with social evils so deeply rooted that uprooting them is tiring, and the people are tired of fighting these evils!
The show ends with a hope, and I will stick to this hope, because in the end, that is all we can do!
4 stars!
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