Tabbar review: Ajiptal Singh's debut show on SonyLIV is a stunning Shakespearean family drama

Language: Hindi Ajitpal Singh’s short film Rammat-Gammat, streaming on MUBI, is set in Gujarat; his first feature film Fire In The Mountain, still roving the film festival circuit, is set in Uttarakhand; his first web-series Tabbar is based in Punjab. The geography slips around, but the directorial control is constant. Whichever format, Singh’s singular grasping of the medium is both unparalleled and compelling. Both Rammat-Gammat and Fire In The Mountain might have the indie stamp — where a character’s glare comes to mean so many things, that after a point it is not worth listing them. It is why people, myself included, tend to find so many of such movies a slog to sit through. So much interiority and yet, no insight. But Singh keeps us enumerating, and thus invested. In Tabbar, created and written by Harman Wadala, and co-written by Sandeep Jain, he brings his sensibility to the mainstream-fore. And for this, he utilizes Shakespearean theatrics. The steely Omkar (Pavan Raj Malhotra) and the expressive Sargun (Supriya Pathak Kapur), parents to the wastrel Tegi (Sahil Mehta) and the IPS aspirant Happy (Gagan Arora), are suddenly caught in a crossfire, killing the drug peddling brother of a local businessman-politician (Ranvir Shorey) in their home. Drugs in Punjab, a scam and a menace, is not pivotal to the story, but injects itself in odd ways without taking center stage. This is not a show about monologue-able morals. It is about the messy aftermath of choices. The first episode, with detail and languor, establishes the theatrical cartwheeling to get to this concocted, unlikely moment of murder — a lot of coincidence, a lot of hand-waving drama. If only this did not happen, that would not have happened. But it did. Now the whole family has to try and dispose the body, and what was supposed to be one murder, one alibi, turns into a webby mess of deceit, lies, counter-lies, blood, and suicide, all to keep the family tethered, alive, and outside jail. In the midst of this cover up is the consignment of drugs that lands up at Omkar’s home by mistake. People will come to claim it, to consume it, to kill for it. There is a stunning amount of drama that is moved along by an accompanying amount of coincidence. People drop by as frequently as they drop dead; crucial evidence — an alarm on the watch, a credit card, a earbud — keeps getting dropped; and the convoluted logic of murder protecting you from being caught for another murder pushes the eight-part show along. Tabbar is not the smartest show, and a lot of the compounding problems find easy solutions, which eventually become easy problems in a later episode. It is almost narratively reckless at points with a startling level of convenience. The poetic flourishes, adding Baba Farid’s oddly translated couplets as epigraphs, and later lyrics for the background score, has little effect, except when given to Daler Mehendi to shriek loud enough for you to turn to a pile of gooseflesh. Do you remember Mirzya , where Mehndi’s voice sprung out of the screen, unprovoked, without warning, like love itself? What the show accomplishes, with such spectacular charisma, is a kind of drama that is tightly wound around its characters.

The tension rarely slips, and the acting, aided by Sneha Khanwalkar’s moody melodies, ground you to a world you begin to care enough to be devastated for.

There are two standout scenes given to Malhotra that I want to think about here. One is a moment when he is totally lost, unable to plot the next move, and instead gets drunk and dances in a haze of alcohol. It is so believable that this stiff man, who has not let out emotion slip thus far, is now howling with his body in a seedy shop by the highway. The other is a moment when his son confesses something dark, something which ties the show together with imposed logic. Omkar wants to forgive his son, and he wants to slap his son, and he wants to be proud of him for coming clean. The muscles on his face twitch. A tear, singular, drops down. When I said Singh is able to craft moments of interiority and insight, this was what I meant. The characters feel like foils, their characteristics exacerbated by those they share space with. This is most apparent with the siblings. But even Omkar’s deadpan stability is complimented, so evocatively, by Pathak’s wide-eyed drama. Guilt makes her hallucinate blood on her hands and on the walls like Lady Macbeth. She roves around, driven mad by circumstances (There is even a nod to Hamlet’s Mousetrap scene, where a police officer is trying to see if Omkar is indeed a murderer by trying to see if he shows guilt).

In a film so rooted to the ground, this theatricality could have felt like a shock, but so ecstatic is Pathak’s performance, and so seamless Singh’s direction — except for the final episode where the dead men walk around like zombies, what was that? — that the final, closing moments of the show, a death leaves behind a shock and a sentiment unlike anything we have seen on streaming. So brutal, yet so kind. Whom to be mad at? Whom to be mad for?

Tabbar is streaming on SonyLIV.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a critic and journalist, who writes a weekly newsletter on culture, literature, and cinema at  prathyush.substack.com.