March 2025 will be remembered as one of the most fertile months on OTT in recent times. While Stephen Graham’s Adolescence struck a chord across the globe, its success in India was a revelation. Yes, Netflix has much to be proud of. Adolescence has sparked debates worldwide on the parent-child relationship.
Do you really know what your child is up to? Just pray they are watching Dupahiya on Amazon. To me, this delightful take on bucolic Bachchanalia was a bigger triumph than Adolescence for two reasons: first, it is far tougher to maintain humorous momentum episode after episode rather than revel in a mood of grimness. Also, I would prefer to take pride in something homespun.
Netflix’s Khakee: The Bengal Chapter also made India’s OTT platform a place of prideful achievement. A coiling-recoiling raga of rage plays itself out in the combustive length and breadth of this lengthy parable on crime and violence in the ‘City of Bhoy (fear),’ as an activist character (all set to become the, ahem, Chief Minister of Kolkata) describes the crime situation in the city.
Also Read: South Movies Lined Up For April 2025: Ajith Kumar’s ‘Good Bad Ugly’, Mammootty’s ‘Bazooka’ & More!
Ram Madhvani’s The Waking of the Nation, on the other hand, failed to kindle patriotic sentiment. We have seen the Jallianwala Bagh pogrom depicted many times on screen—most notably in Shoojit Sircar’s Udham Singh—and we will soon see Karan Johar revisit the carnage on the big screen in Kesari 2, likely far more effectively. Madhvani’s series was not bad. It was just… dull—a plodding depiction of a historical mishap.
Loot Kaand on Amazon, on the other hand, yanked a real-life event (the arms drop in Purulia) and turned it into some kind of kinky, lanky fictional outing, replete with thumping action. Actors like Tania Maniktala and Sahil Mehta deserve better. So do we.
Finally, Kanneda on JioHotstar, about a rapper in Canada trying to wrap his head around a career in music and crime, was a letdown. Despite a convincing performance by Parmish Varma, Kanneda remained a potentially explosive experience beaten down by its own lack of ambition.
