Some Thoughts On…Ghoul

Earlier this year, Netflix released Sacred Games, the first Indian original series, which is a part of a new initiative by the streaming service to tap into a mostly ignored audience through a partnership with Phantom Films. Ghoul is a new series that was made with Netflix and Phantom Films collaborating with Blumhouse.

The series is written and directed by Patrick Graham, a British writer/director based in Mumbai. It takes place in the near future where India has turned into a dystopian regime, where folks are encouraged to report on anything that goes against the unquestioned nationalism that is promoted in the name of stopping terrorism. Muslim literature is burned, and people are often dragged away from their home by the police and never to be seen again.

With this backdrop, we meet Nida Rahim (Radhika Apte), a newly promoted “enhanced interrogation officer,” who is so devoted to the cause that she turned in her own father to the system because he intended on teaching his students things that were not part of the state sanctioned syllabus. She is brought to work in a prison site where a terrorist, Ali Saeed (Mahesh Balraj), is taken in for interrogation and torture. However, something about him is off, and things soon take a strange and very supernatural turn.

The show plays like the lovechild of George Romero and Ray Bradbury, combining elements of social horror and dystopian fiction to great effect. The ghoul in question is inspired by a creature from Islamic folklore, which eats people and takes their form. This element brings an insane amount of tension, leading to moments that feel ripped right out of John Carpenter’s The Thing, since no one in the government facility can tell who is one of them and who is the ghoul in disguise. It builds so much dread and atmosphere, using imagery that is all too familiar, be it from the Holocaust or something like the pictures of American soldiers torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. It doesn’t use these images cheaply, though, as it’s used as a tool for its very pointed indictment on Indian nationalism. The ghoul is less a standard monster-as-metaphor as much as it is a monster-as-force-of-retribution. You end up rooting for all these horrible people to get what’s coming to them.

At the center of all the action is Radhika Apte, and if you thought she got the short end of the stick in Sacred Games or Lust Stories, she gets a lot to work with here. With her character being a Muslim, she is under constant pressure to show her loyalty, sometimes in the face of officers who don’t buy her for a second. She goes through a compelling arc in recognizing the true horror of what the government is really doing, and the bravery it takes to stand up to it. She handles herself well with the wide range of emotions she deals with as her very sense of reality is almost constantly shifting. Her co-stars Manav Kaul, Ratnabali Bhattacharjee, Mahesh Balraj, and Mallhar Goenka are also quite good, but it’s ultimately Apte’s show, and she kills it.

Ghoul is just awesome. It’s nasty, creepy, thrilling, gory, but it’s all in service of a compelling and necessary theme. Radhika Apte is phenomenal in it. With only three episodes, each being just over 45 minutes, the show is very much worth your time, and it won’t leave you with the blue balls of a cliffhanger that Sacred Games did. It’s tightly and elegantly constructed and leaves you satisfied, though, I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing more. I highly recommend checking this out. It might deal in some Indian specificity, but it’s told in a way that can make is accessible to just about anyone who is in the mood for a good scare.