Prathyush Parasuraman
In 1994, in the heart of Bangalore, Shakeereh Khaleeli, the granddaughter of the former Diwan of Mysore, one of the oldest aristocratic families of Karnataka, was found murdered. The suspect is her second husband Swami Shraddhananda or Murli Manohar Mishra.
The central question is, who is Shraddhananda? What were the exact circumstances in which he entered Namazie’s life? Yet, Dancing on the Grave brushes past these doubts almost as if it considers them immaterial, inhabiting the prejudicial blindness of Namazie’s family towards Shraddhananda. It isn’t interested in layering, just complicating.
However the predictive dullness of Dancing on the Grave pales against its incompetence. To ask a speculative question set in a counterfactual world — what a stupid thing to do. And for what? An emotional grunt from the accused protagonist? This curdles, especially when the show refuses to ask Shraddhananda the imperative questions about his claims of innocence.
There’s a hunger for true crime, which has quickly established itself as a new audience favourite, and the genre intrinsically smacks of a certain kind of voyeurism. When, after a celebrity dies, a news channel recreates their death on live television. How different is the true crime documentary. The director makes a deliberate choice to re-enact the moment of Namazie’s murder in Dancing on the Grave.
Who can think of the moral problems of a show while quaking, thinking of locking doors and latching windows? Unfortunately when the craft is as weak and the tricks so obvious as they are in Dancing on the Grave, you only have the moral grayness of the genre staring back at you.