Rahul Desai
Evidently, Abhishek Chaubey’s series has a lot going on. The narrative chaos is part of the fable-like design and title. It raises the age-old question surrounding the excesses of ‘soup storytelling’: Are you in for the ride or the destination?
Killer Soup encourages us to enjoy it through both lenses. Like Guns and Gulaabs (2023), the ride is inventive, crowded and overlong. There’s magic realism, pop culture and everything in between.
Getting lost in its greedy web is fun – like strolling through a tourist town and entering quirky bylanes without a plan. At times, it’s also like getting lost on the cold outskirts and not remembering the way back during a transport strike.
There are no rules. Anything goes. It’s like being hurled into a washing machine of the makers’ personal influences.
The tone is so willfully scattershot that it can get disorienting. Everyone wants to be the protagonist. Life stories collide for space. A few episodes in, it’s hard to recall what a character’s previous scene was, or where they stand in terms of their individual arcs.
Killer Soup implies that those like Swathi and Umesh can’t even lose like they are destined to. Forget failing in life, they can’t even fail in the language of literature. Forget the destination, they can’t even afford the legacy of a ride.