'Black Warrant' review: Unflinching look at Tihar’s murky world

The year’s begun on a good though grim note for the Indian OTT space. ‘Black Warrant’, adapted from Sunetra Choudhury’s book, is Vikramaditya Motwane doing his thang slickly with his knack of extracting stand-out performances from his actors intact. Motwane also created India’s first streaming original ‘Sacred Games’ for Netflix in 2018. Pretty sure the platform will describe this latest venture as ‘gritty’ if they haven’t already.

‘Everyone here is a snake...some bite, some get bitten,’ DSP Rajesh Tomar (played menacingly by Rahul Bhat) tells the new, timid-looking jailer Sunil Kumar Gupta (Zahan Kapoor). This sets the tone for a seven-episode sojourn into the sunless world of Delhi’s Tihar Jail of the 1980s. Here, gang wars are common between prisoners who live in crowded barracks “like cattle” as the Home Minister on a surprise visit flippantly comments; corruption is par for the course and no one trusts no one.

The series features bite-size stories of many real-life crimes and criminals, including the deliberately suave ‘bikini killer’ Charles Sobhraj (Siddhant Gupta) who is shown to be living stylishly inside the jail, complete with sex, food and drugs on demand. Thoughtfully crafted, it steers clear of unnecessary twists to spice up the proceedings. Mostly, this is real life, stark, painted with the grey muted colours of everyday cruelty and practised apathy. Zahan (Shashi Kapoor’s grandson) is competent as the baby-faced newbie facing moral compulsions for the first time.

And bravo to Anurag Thakur who plays Gupta’s Haryanvi colleague — what a star performer!

The series was produced by Applause Entertainment.