If you descry the doomsday clock, the end of the world is still 5 billion years away, which is a comfortable number if you don’t subscribe to the laws of karma and rebirth. In terms of milestones and timelines, those years are already strewn with the skeletons of species and deadwood of flora that Nature had so carefully cultivated in an equilibria and ontological miracle.
Creator-director Richie Mehta (Delhi Crime) views the destruction of that finely tuned ecosystem through a lens framed in bloody ivory in Poacher, as he leverages the true life story of Operation Shikaar that kicks off with a guilt-wracked forest caretaker, Aruku (Sooraj Pops, shiveringly good) stumbling into the Malayattoor Forest Department Division HQ and stunning the Department Forest Officer (DFO) Adil Sheikh (Sanoop Dinesh) with information on active elephant poaching in the forests, of a gang on a rampage that threatens not to stop until the last of the pachyderms are wiped out. This breathless and contrite confession sets into motion the wheels of multiple agencies, but the first cog here is the Indian Forest Service (IFS) to which Adil belongs, and now faces heat from his seniors Kishore Kumar (Vinod Sharawat) and Field Director Neel (Dibyendu Bhattacharya) and suspends a bunch of deputies including Vijay Babu (Ankith Madhav, entirely winsome).
With a piece of impossibly elephantine machinery threatening to play red tape and leakage, Neel keeps his focus and team tight, enabling the roping-in of range officer Mala Jogi (Nimisha Sajayan), while Alan, a breezy IT data cruncher—a breezy and empathetic Roshan Mathew—who moonlights as a life-saving antidote matrix of snake bite-and-venom-effect jumps in, here the triangulator of call data records and suspects’ movements across thickets of concrete and timber.
While the assembling of the team is the mechanics to initiate its sniffing down trails to lead them to the poaching gang and the masters that control these savage killings, it’s in the similar impact that such a job has on the team’s personal lives that’s genuinely affecting. Here’s Alan nimbly fox-trotting between social dos and putdowns to tracking rogues. There’s Neel, whose marital relationship is heading down the same road as his medical condition. Here’s Mala fighting the ghosts of her familial past with gritted teeth, Sajayan’s act powered by steely grit and a manic focus, much like a ferocious hunter. Which is why, as the dialogue says at one point, it’s hunters who make for the best conservationists.
And as the trio pays the price of their salary—do any of them truly care about how much they make as much as they do about making the forest what it was meant to be: a harmonious symphony of animal life and elements?—they get weighed down between fighting the guilt of ignoring outreached hands—Alan’s wife (Ranjitha Menon) and son, Mala’s mother and perhaps a mortified Vijay Babu (the suspended officer), Neel’s wife—and carrying on the dangerous fight of preventing forest slaughters. There’s also the terrific Kani Kusruti playing DFO Dina, her performance a startling focus of an impossible battle, but not as overt as Mala’s. How you wish Dina had more to do here.
But Richie Mehta is here for the elephants, and he makes sure you are, too. Almost every episode begins with the progressive rotting of an elephant carcass, an indication of how slowly and surely we’re stripping our—and future generations—of the rich tapestry of life and harmony that took billions of years to weave. You watch helplessly as Nature takes over, ensuring that none of the animal’s remains go to waste, sickened at the thought of accelerated destruction. The dialogues may seem preachy at times, but how else do you stick it to your audience: elephants play a hefty part in the ecological workflow that includes protecting flora, green cover, and human lungs? That it comes from Neel is a stark pointer to what places such as Delhi can do to people’s pulmonary systems; that if unchecked, a verdant part of Kerala could clean out its greenery and fill its population’s respiratory system with toxins.
The director also wants us to know that Nature’s creations are keeping an eye on us—with hope, hopelessness, or plain wariness, is the question. (After the series, I pitched for the last option.) But it’s a beautiful construct to show the beings with whom we share our planet: actually, make it the other way around. Our rapid ascension to the top of the food chain has ensured that we’ve chewed our way through it and, in the process, left little for regrowth or reconstruction. Throughout the series, various animals and birds are watchful from their perch, wondering where and how this investigation—and all of life—will end. Will they be part of the price Nature will extract in a ruthless reboot?
Cinematographer Johan Heurlin Aidt offers little hope, his frames dripping in the color of unforgiving mist and fog, while composer Andrew Lockington keeps the tension and the pain in unrelenting, effective focus. With the dialogues by Amrita Bagchi, Gopan Chidambaran, and Suprotim Sengupta seamlessly straddling different languages, the show’s level is upped by Dibyendu Bhattacharya’s fine act, an all-pervasive force of truth and doing the right thing, even if it means bending the rules slightly. Plus, there’s the superb Sapna Sand playing Poonam Verma, a key player based out of Delhi who dons a skin thicker than the animals she has poached and with none of the humanness they display. It’s a chilling act of greed and disconnect from the cycle of life and balance, connected as such rackets are to the international mafia (of Chinese Triads and Japanese Yakuza).
Elephants parade using genetic memory in search of food and water, and we’re racing to erase every inch of that memory and its connections. Which is why, as the show hurtles into a climactic showdown in the narrow bylanes of Delhi where a crowd swells up to confront the Forest Department’s team and the local police, you feel a clammy chill. Because that Doomsday Clock seems to tick fastest—as does your heart—not in the presence of a herd but in the face of a rogue human mob.
Movie data powered by IMDb. All images owned by the producers. Poacher is streaming on Prime Video and rated A (Restricted to adults)
Poacher
Director Richie Mehta Time~40m
Writers Richie Mehta, Amrita Bagchi, Gopan Chidambaran, Surendra Kumar, Suprotim Sengupta,
Stars Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Nimisha Sajayan, Roshan Mathew, Ankith Madhav
