Amazon Prime Video dropped the first trailer of its upcoming quirky comedy-cum-thriller series, Afsos. More a satirical black comedy in the garb of a thriller, it is comic Anirban Dasgupta’s first foray into writing a web series. Expectations, naturally, are high.
The trailer introduces us to the protagonist Nakul (Gulshan Devaiah), as he ponders over his place in the universe. While he ponders, our attention is diverted to his head – it is positioned strategically on a railway track, right in the path of an incoming train. But… he lives to tell the tale…. to his shrink (Anjali Patil, of Newton fame). She repeats in incredulous wonder – this was your eleventh attempt?
Therein lies the premise of the web series Afsos, Amazon Prime Video’s first Indian Original series of the new year.
As the trailer tells us, Nakul wants to end his life, but fails in all his eleven suicide attempts. He decides to outsource the job. An eccentric pair of contract killers comes into the picture (Ratnabali Bhattacharjee and Ujjwal Chopra). The duo mouths some truly hilarious lines. A female assassin Upadhyay (Heeba Shah) is entrusted with the job of helping Nakul end his life.
The rest of the trailer shows a hilarious comedy of errors, a thrilling chase, fleeting images of a long-haired messiah….. and a ghost!
The 2:25 minute trailer certainly piqued our interest. What really stood out for us were the hilarious dialogues, the sparkling wit, the sarcastic black humour and the dead pan expressions of the protagonists when they nonchalantly spout lines that are riproaringly funny.
Other than the aforementioned characters, the trailer gave us passing shots of the rest of the cast—we caught a glimpse of a harried-looking Dhruv Sehgal—but the trailer didn’t disclose their specific roles.
Well-known comic Danish Sait, Aakash Dahiya, Dhruv Sehgal and Jamie Alter are the other members of the eclectic ensemble cast, besides cameos by Biswa Kalyan Rath and Anirban Dasgupta himself.
The 8-part Afsos is written by Anirban Dasgupta, along with Dibya Chatterjee and Sourav Ghosh, and is directed by Anubhuti Kashyap and Ramesh Damodaran.
From the looks of the trailer, Afsos seems to be fast-paced and thrilling, and looking to leave us with something to chew on – a profound message, an epiphany, the light at the end of the tunnel? We’ll have the answer to that on 17th January. That’s when Afsos premieres on Amazon Prime Video.
In the meanwhile, catch the trailer here –
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