The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case review: Deft, Detailed, Daring, Throbbing & Smashingly Blow by Blow Account

The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case review: Deft, Detailed, Daring, Throbbing $ Smashingly Blow by Blow Account

‘The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case’ - Deft and detailed, The Hunt emerges as a throbbing, blow-by-blow account of the investigation following one of the most controversial crimes in contemporary India

The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case review

21st May 1991, Sriperumbudur. In just a flick of a second, a bustling gathering turned into a ghastly sight of mutilated bodies. Our Ex-PM, Shri Rajiv Gandhi’s body was blown into smithereens, by a human bomb. The suicide bomber was part of the militant organization from Sri Lanka who vowed to assassinate him during his whirlwind tour, as part of his elections campaign. And, while the nation was rattled and mourning in fury, a nine-member SIT (Special Investigation Team) team was immediately formed to probe into the matter and a nationwide manhunt was launched to nab Sivarasan, the elusive architect of the assassination plot.

 

The Hunt, which borrows it's source material from Anirudhya Mitra’s book, “90 Days : The True Story of the hunt for Rajiv Gandhi’s Assassins” emerges as a solid thriller by showrunner and National-award winner Nagesh Kukunoor, who shapes it out as an intense, race-against-time investigation procedural with a meticulous penchant for period and performances.

While Kukunoor plunges into drama and detailing, we see an incredible interplay of the ensemble cast in the thick of action. Hunt looks achingly authentic in its linguistic representation (Characters exchanging in Tamil form a large flab of the narrative) and recreation of the 90s setting, the lesser-known extremist of Tamil Nadu, gradually spilling over to the remote areas of Karnataka and the techno-functional gadgets of that era.

 

There are some deviations that Kukunoor and his team of writers – Rohit Banawalikar and Sriram Rajan, undertake while penning the screenplay. Anirudhya being a character in his authored book is wiped off in the series. Also, the larger conspiracies and the unanswered questions are hinted at, but not explored which the source did. Where it succeeds is the throbbing and layered depiction of espionage, blurred loyalties, crippling bureaucracy, intelligence breakdowns and the sheer compromise of human justice. 

“One Man’s hero is another’s terrorist”, the philosophy of Tigers of Jaffna baffles you. Crime or Cyanide consumption at arrest doesn’t deter their spirit. In one of the scenes, an interrogator gets furious when one of the captured terrorists addresses the assassination as a social function! In another, a psychological warfare to break a criminal leaf you viscerally wounded. You sigh with a little whiff of humour when one of the SIT members asks for Odomus to fight mosquitoes in the night, during the unrelenting pursuit served as a chronological sequence of events.

But what truly holds your attention in the dense and sprawling seven-part series is its staggering performances – a true testament to Casting Bay’s impeccable scouting of relatively-unknown but worthy actors. Amit Sial as DR Karthikeyan, head of the SIT, is wonderfully understated. Holding his emotions and predicaments with poise, the Safari-suit clad Sial reflects an astute sense of work ethics and diplomacies. Sahil Vaid, with his concrete grip on Tamil, emulates the volatile interrogator Amit Verma with perfection, while his colleague Bagavathy Perumal aka Bucks is brilliant as the soft-spoken and relentlessly persistent DSP Raghothaman. Danish Iqbal exudes an inherently decent, calibrated yet committed persona for Amod Kant. One of the intense scenes sees him subjugating a female terrorist with his sheer brute strength in a safe house located in the clumsy lanes of Paharganj, Delhi (DoP Sangram Giri, good job)– again, a testimony to the arduous exploration of locations.

To give credit where due, Shafeeq Mustafa as Sivarasan is deliciously daunting and gets under your skin. The actor depicts the one-eyed, physically-unremarkable mastermind with authority and a rare degree of perceptive understanding. Vidyuth Gargi plays his part of the NSG commando, AK Ravindran with utmost honesty. The female brigade, comprising Anjana Balaji (as Nalini), Shruty Jayan (as suicide bomber Dhanu) and Gouri Padmakar (as Subha) render stupendous performances.

 

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