Chef’s Kiss
Despite an uneven recipe, Abhishek Chaubey’s Killer Soup has enough strong performances and intrigue to make for a palatable—and entertaining—main course.
There are two moments of contrasting physical intimacy which encapsulate the moodboards of suspense and humour in the new Netflix series Killer Soup. Both these moments are delivered by Umesh, a masseuse played by Manoj Bajpayee. In the first, Umesh performs a massage on massage on a well-to-do businessman, Prabhakar Shetty—or Prabhu—also played by Bajpayee in a double-role. Their resemblance is only commented at light-heartedly, as if the characters on-screen are somewhat blind to a secret that the rest of the audience is privy to. Later, Umesh is now in the privacy of his bedroom, now massaging Swathi (Konkana Sensharma), Prabhu’s wife, who is having an affair with Umesh, her husband’s doppelgänger.
Umesh is rough on Prabhu, pressing hard, cranking his bones and muscles, massaging him with a promise that the pain could lead to eventual relief. On Swathi, however—his beloved—Umesh’s hands turn into soft, caressing balms, soothing her from her stress.
As his hands pass from the husband to the wife over the course of the same day, Umesh remains witness to their words: eavesdropping on Prabhu’s business dealings with his brother, and lending Swathi a sympathetic ear regarding her marriage and her ambitions. It’s a triangle of love and money, before the shape evolves into an intricate polygon of secrets, lies, hijinks, and death.
Created by Abhishek Chaubey, Killer Soup owes its inspiration to a true crime story of adultery, murder, and duplicity. In a real-life incident in 2017 (which in itself was inspired by a plot point of the 2014 Telugu film Yevadu), a nurse in Telangana murdered her husband, disposed his body, and then sprayed acid on her lover’s face. The hope was that the lover—his face now indistinguishable—would seamlessly replace the husband, without raising any alarm among family or police authorities. Their plans, however, were spoiled over a dietary restriction: the lover refused the mutton soup he was offered at the hospital, citing that he was vegetarian; but relatives, who knew that the husband was a meat-eater, raised alarms in suspicion. A confession was made, and the murderous, adulterous couple were arrested.
With this perfectly absurd premise, Killer Soup could only get weirder and wilder. Based in a fictional town of Mainjur in Kerala, Chaubey’s eight-part black comedy/thriller features a married woman’s who ends up replacing her deceased husband with an acid-scarred lover, all steaming under the unmissable motifs of food: of secret recipes, restauranteur aspirations, and a chicken-bone soup (paya) to die for. Inspired by the horror of the serene and South Indian pulp fiction, the series shoots for Hitchcock in a Malayali accent.
Killer Soup opens with a morning routine: Prabhu, who takes his time to cleanse and bathe before sitting down to stare at his meal; while Swathi, who has prepared the soup, stands like a nervous school student waiting for her teacher to judge her work. This is Swathi’s grand delusion: that her passion for cooking must naturally result in cooking success. The soup is disgusting. At various times in the series, diners pour away the broth, spit it out, curse it outright, or lie to her face to gain her favour.
Secrets, lies, and truths withheld form the backbone of Killer Soup. While she may be a somewhat demurring wife at home, Swathi lives a second life: she surreptitiously attends cooking classes to improve her soup recipe, while she also carries on an extra-marital affair with Umesh, a lowly masseur who can only offer her his affection. Swathi has dreams of opening her own restaurant someday, and it is only this ambition that continues to keep her invested in a marriage with Prabhu. But Prabhu has no intentions to honour his promise to Swathi, and instead, plans to ‘raise’ money from his businessman brother, Arvind (Sayaji Shinde).
Chaubey’s eight-part black comedy/thriller features a married woman’s who ends up replacing her deceased husband with an acid-scarred lover, all steaming under the unmissable motifs of food: of secret recipes, restauranteur aspirations, and a chicken-bone soup (paya) to die for.
Between the obvious overtones of a soup so bad that it could “kill”, a man embezzling money from his own brother, a wife having an affair with her husband’s lookalike, a world filled with sex and gamblers and gangsters, and a private investigator who meets an untimely death, there is enough intrigue in the very first episode—all delivered with a flair of dark comedy—to have the viewer hooked.
The script is pacy and fun, allowing actors of “highbrow” quality, like Sensharma and Bajpayee, to let lose in a pulp genre. After Prabhu’s death, the caper begins, leaving Swathi and Umesh behind to weave an intricate plot to survive (and hopefully, thrive) in the aftermath.
With the police authorities alerted to the private investigator’s death, Killer Soup dives straight into the genre of murder mystery. Bodies continue to pile up, offering more twists to the tale. Killer Soup encourages viewers to a suspension of disbelief throughout the series. The ghost of a recently-dead police officer haunts Hassan, the inspector chasing the white rabbit to solve the growing list of grisly murders. A horde of fireflies help uncover important clues. Words out of a poetry book become apocryphal signposts in Hassan’s investigation. And a long list of fortuitous (or ill-fortuitous) mishaps moves the plot along.
No one, it seems, is entirely safe, and characters are introduced—and disposed of—in quick succession. But poor character-building leaves many of the survivors disposable, too. Killer Soup is populated with a handful of slightly-glorified caricatures, plucked out of Agatha Christie and pulp stereotypes, who often appear as two-dimensional shadows, barely able to break out of their predetermined box. These include a greedy businessman (Arvind), a love-struck paramour (Kirtima), an uncle with a cruel streak (Lucas), or a bumbling-but-dedicated policeman (Hassan). Hassan (Nassar), the policeman who is seemingly always one step behind the crime, only communicates with an overblown sense of aggression. Most women in the series uses their sexuality to further their goals, and most men easily succumb to it.
These (and other) caricatures are neither funny enough for a comedy nor serious enough for a thriller. Killer Soup is let down in this middle space: not attentive to detail enough to be serious, and conversely, not over-the-top enough to be pulp. Not until the final episodes of the series are the characters allowed to grow beyond their stuffy boxes.
Even Swathi—the heartbeat of the story, stirring the plot forward—has been written with little nuance or imagination. She is motivated by one thing, and one thing alone: her restaurant. When Prabhu is “replaced” by Umesh, Swathi soon begins to feel the same sense of suffocation and dissatisfaction from her lover that she’d once felt from her husband. These moments are delightful opportunities for the show to explore an identical streak (beyond the physical likeness) in the two men—and perhaps, in most men. Alas, Swathi is not given room to ruminate on these themes and evolve accordingly. Her character’s interiority is a black box, with viewers given no clue to any complexity that might be brewing in her thoughts: about losing Prabhu, finding Umesh, or about the presence of her morose adult son who doesn’t yet know that he’s lost his father.
Sensharma’s performance is a saving grace: the veteran actor gets under Swathi’s skin to provide a menacing heart to an otherwise poorly-written character. It is her adventurous spirit on screen that carries the character through a wider gamut of moods.
Swathi, like almost everyone else in the extended-Shetty household, is selfish and self-centred. It’s a family drama that glosses over the emotional repercussions of family. In Killer Soup, this selfishness isn’t just a character trait: it’s the only vessel for the characters to swim in.
Despite these flaws, however, the show remains entertaining. The chase is just intriguing enough to pique the viewer’s interest, the pace of twists and turns keep the show moving forward rapidly as a rummage of secrets pile up between the characters.
Weaving it all together is the palette of sights and sounds and the cinematography that makes Killer Soup truly irresistible. The series is filmed exquisitely, with a generous attention to detail: the brushstrokes painted on a canvas, the kumkum on Swathi’s bindi, and the steam from a cooking pot, its aroma so intimate that one can almost smell it across the screen. The montage scenes are filled with eclectic and diverse musical and visual choices, including a memorable feature of Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” at a crucial juncture at the penultimate episode.
By the finale, the loud crescendo of storylines come together for a climactic resolution. The ending of Killer Soup, however, undercuts much of the writing that led to its buildup. By the time the soup boils to its climax, there are too many unresolved loose threads, leaving a little more to be desired from the hands of a capable chef like Chaubey.
Overall, the meal remains satisfying—and even delicious at times. As advertised, Sensharma and Bajpayee’s chemistry is excellent, and is the major driver of why Killer Soup works well. Halfway through the series, Umesh and Swathi begin to show signs of a couple not ignited by reckless romance, but bounded down by the burdens of marriage. It is only right that the two leads share the screen in one of the most powerful moments in the show, as the ambitious potpourri of ingredients simmer together to provide the perfectly intimate main course: Sensharma and Bajpayee lying on the floor, surrounded by a money and a pool of blood, sharing the taste of an unforgettable, sensual kiss.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar. His debut novel A Beautiful Decay (Aleph Book Company) was published in October 2022. His work has appeared in Epiphany, Sycamore Review, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, Fifty Two, Scroll, The Caravan, the anthology A Case of Indian Marvels (Aleph Book Company) and The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2022 (Hawakal). You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1, Instagram: @karanmadhok, and Threads: @karanmadhok.
