Dayaa Review: JD Chakravarthy Does The Heavy Lifting In A Show That Has Decent Merit But Also Depends A Lot On Him

Cast: JD Chakravarthy, Ramya Nambeeshan, Eesha Rebba, Vishnupriya Bhimeneni, Babloo Prithiveeraj, Josh Ravi, and ensemble.

Creator: Pavan Sadineni

Director: Pavan Sadineni

Streaming On: Disney+ Hotstar

Language: Telugu

Runtime: 8 Episodes, Around 30 Minutes Each

Dayaa Review: What’s It About:

Dayaa, a Freezer Van driver, picks his last delivery of the day just to earn some extra bucks and soon realises that someone has loaded up a dead body of a woman in his van. He keeps it hidden for a long time until someone starts blackmailing him to deliver to body somewhere. When the cat is out of the bad, he realises the game is much bigger and he leaves behind his disguise show his real self.

Dayaa Review: What Works:

Thrillers that connect multiple characters with a thread that is complex are very interesting. Remember Mahanagaram? How multiple nameless people got connected due to one misidentification leading to a complete chaos. In Dayaa, a remake of a Bengali show Taqdeer, it is the destiny at play as one wrong turn leads to another until the beast is unleashed. It is technically a man being pushed so much to the wall that his revolt is more for his survival than just saving himself.

Created by Pavan Sadineni, with Vasant Kumar Jurru, and Rakendu Mouli, Dayaa establishes itself pretty well. A man who is non-violent, chooses peace over quarrels, and has no issues with choosing the failing side if it means he can avoid argument, is stuck in a situation that tests his threshold. With a amazing background music, the opening of Dayaa is very promising. The show uses the frames and its characters to introduce you to the scale of the show. It looks raw and robust with no room for vanity. It is through the leading man that you see things, and everything that you see flips midway, only to realise that the problem was never as bigger as the mystery that wasn’t even teased so far.

It helps that Dayaa doesn’t follow the easy troops of using short flashbacks and spoil the mystery behind its leading man. You are suddenly told what he actually is and how lethal the twists and turns are about to be. The blueprint of Dayaa is definitely lucrative, and one can see why the people involved must have said yes to the job. While there are many problems when the story goes beyond Dayaa, but the world around him is very interesting and intriguing enough to hook the audience.

There is a Satya reference and it works pretty well. Not spoiling it for anyone.

Dayaa Review: Star Performance:

It’s high time JD Chakravarthy realises he is a good actor, and being the hero comes naturally to him. The actor is surprisingly good, and the transition he goes through never looks odd because he is believable as both, a naive man and a man who can burn down the world. While there is we enough drama in the story, visually, the drama is quite balanced, and a lot of it is because of JD and how he permanently anchors the scenes.

Josh Ravi deserves a special mention for making himself notice, even when the character is quite stereotypical. The actor plays his part with conviction, and you can see his transition too. Eesha Rebba is good too, and the most mysterious character of this setup because, at some point in the time, we are not shown anything of, she was the lead of this story. The actor is impressive and deserves some more screen time.

Ramya Nambeeshan plays Kavitha, the character that triggers everything in this world in the first place. Her arc isn’t explored much for us to sympathize with her. The actor is decent in what she does.

Dayaa Review: What Doesn’t Work:

The biggest drawback in Dayaa is the fact that the screenplay suffers is that it drops the tonality entirely when it shifts bases from Dayaa’s plot. When it tracks Kavitha and her battle with the men in power who make women go through hell to induce their fear in society, the setup becomes very weak. Everything around Kavitha looks temporary and built for the scene, and not a place or situation lived in.

For instance, her office, a newsroom, is so stereotypical and in your face that you don’t have to be an expert to see the tropes. Boss demanding visuals of models with deep neck outfits to ease down the vibe of the channels after reporting about a rape case, a righteous journalist, who will eventually die and you know it, and more. The exploration of Kavitha’s world is so haphazard for a story so complex that, till the very end, she is no more than a dead lady with a cause. And there is a whole lot of meat there.

The show invests a lot of time in tracing some tiny things and keeps the big ones for the very end, and wraps them in an instant. Like the transformation of Dayaa happens in a very exciting scene, and you are caught off guard, but nothing concrete about his past is explored by investing more time. The same happens with his wife, she has a big twist too, but we are never told what actually made her do what she did, and we are shown in a very brief scene.

We also meet a cop who is fighting third-stage lung cancer. Why are we told this? How is it consequential to this story? Why was he surprised to see Dayaa’s wife? When do you solve so many cliffhangers?

Dayaa Review: Last Words:

Dayaa is an example that JD Chakravarthy still has a very good screen presence and manages to be the best part about the show that has some flaws.

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