‘Student of the Year: After Dark’ review: A frozen corpse thaws into silliness

The film Student of the Year, best known for launching the careers of Alia Bhatt, Varun Dhawan and Sidharth Malhotra in 2012, yielded a sequel in 2019. It has now spawned a web series. Student of the Year: After Dark badly wants to be edgy, gruesome and socially relevant, a high-stakes battle between youngsters who want more than winning dance contests and acing quizzes.

The six-episode Hindi series is out on JioHotstar. The setting is the elite, snooty and mercifully fictitious St Teresa’s College. A bunch of students prowls its corridors after hours, participating in a deadly competition being conducted by a person hidden behind a screen and volunteers wearing wolf-faced masks.

One of the participants is Aditi (Shanaya Kapoor), who is investigating the death of her identical twin Aayesha. Found at the bottom of a frozen lake, St Theresa’s resident queen bee now lies on a slab in a mortuary, waiting to be thawed.

Aditi takes her sister’s place at St Theresa – don’t ask how – and starts going down a list of suspects whose names appear on the screen in crimson-hued text. The boyfriend Sid (Divik Sharma), the admirer Rehaan (Abhinav Singh), the bestie Tara (Manya Grover), Tara’s boyfriend Jay-D (Adi Malik) and the roommate Babydoll (Deeya Damini) – any one of them could have done Aayesha in.

Or could it be the college dean (Vivek Gomber), who has replaced a principal who perished suspiciously? Even as Aditi surpasses Sherlock Homes in ratiocination, she joins the bitterly fought Student of the Year contest, whose prize is access to unbridled world domination, or something like it.

Written by Reema Maya and Debashish Irengbam and directed by Maya, the series is a hot mess in a chilly place. All the cliches about college life are here: preening teenagers, hipslang, bullying, parental pressure, competitiveness. All the cliches about pretzel-shaped mysteries are here too: deception, outright lying, MacGuffins, concealed motives. There is domestic drama too, supplied by Aditi’s complicated relationship with her parents (Sheeba Chaddha and Khalid Siddiqui) and Sid, who is overwhelmed at all times by his domineering family.

Influenced by a host of international productions, among them 13 Reasons Why, Squid Game and Wednesday, Student of the Year: After Dark never quite realises its own tone. Shanaya Kapoor, her overwrought Aditi unconvincing from the start, leads a pack of young actors directed to pout endlessly and mug furiously.

There is a feeling throughout of playacting at being grown-up and thoughtful – by some of the characters, who are not who they appear to be, and by the creators, who are unable to get a handle on the numerous twists and the frantic turn of events. The inevitable tumbling out of secrets and hidden motives drags on for so long that the temptation to skip directly to the final episode is very high.

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