The Village – Amazon Prime Six-Episode Web Series Review

The Village is a six-episode horror series that marks India’s first-ever live-action adaptation of a graphic novel. The show’s creator, Milind Rau, ambitiously attempts to create a world with tremendous potential, but unfortunately, the series falls short of expectations. The storyline is set in a small coastal town called Kattiyal in Tuticorin, where a deserted village is filled with bioluminescent flora and fauna, weird elves, a creepy pulsating creature, and zombie-like creatures called mutants filled with pus boils. Although the world is tailor-made for thrilling storytelling, the series fails to deliver on its premise.

The Village – Amazon Prime Six-Episode Web Series Review

The plot follows an ignorant family consisting of Gautham, Neha, their daughter Maya, and their pet Beagle dog Hectic, who get stranded at Kattiyal due to a car puncture. When Gautham goes alone to a nearby town to seek help, Neha and Maya are mysteriously abducted, leading to a chain of horrifying events. Gautham, with the help of Peter, Karunagam, and Sakthivel, locals who share a history with Kattiyal, must rescue his family from the unknown forces that have taken them.

Throughout its six-episode run, The Village is full of mind-numbingly campy dialogues. Even with the exposition dumps and how unoriginal they are, the dialogues are somehow stretched beyond effect and, at times, repeated. The interactions between stone-cold mercenaries and panic-stricken scientists are decent spaces to introduce some levity, but the jokes you get here make you wish for some skeleton in Kattiyal to wake up and object to such blasphemous attempts at humour.

The characters are cardboard cutouts, and it’s disappointing that so much of the screen time could have been used to dig deep into these characters. When one of the soldiers dies, the mercenaries do a farewell ritual of sorts with a dramatic score in the background, but you don’t care. The mercenaries somehow top it all, even with how they shoot something that is feet away. George Maryan is wasted in this role, but Arya’s Gautham is terrible as a horror series protagonist. Nothing feels organic, and you are constantly put off by something or the other.

The set designs, particularly inside the factory in Kattiyal, are mighty impressive, but the same cannot be said for other technical aspects like the colour grading. You never understand why one part of Kattiyal seems to be graded day-for-night while the same part on a different day or a different part of the village at the same time looks starkly different.

In addition to its shortcomings, The Village does hint at a second season, but the question remains, do we need that? The series is an ambitious attempt at something fresh for Tamil cinema, set in rural Tamil Nadu and mentioning a real social issue in the backstory. However, merely setting it in rural Tamil Nadu doesn’t make it an ingenious local attempt if the rest of it still comes across as a bad imitation of Western titles.

Overall, while The Village has some redeeming qualities, it ultimately fails to deliver on its potential, with mind-numbingly campy dialogues, cardboard cutout characters, and technical inconsistencies. Despite its ambitious premise and impressive set designs, the series falls short of expectations and leaves much to be desired.