Tooth Pari Is A Toothache Best Avoided

Tooth Pari: When Love  Bites(Netflix,8 Episodes)

Rating: * ½

There is nothing truthful  about Tooth Pari . It is a series founded on fabrications and  laden with lies. It is like  a plastic tree pretending to be  an ancient  branch of wisdom with creepy reptiles  and snakes crawling all  over  the branches.

After trying to make head or tail  out of this frail tale I was left feeling exhausted and pale  as  if  I had been bitten by one of those vampires in this creepy  but unintentionally comic  rampage  into the world of  sanguinary desires  rendered  so abstruse  it feels more like a riddle with no  solution than a series meant to entertain/enthrall/intrigue.

Tooth Pari ticks none of  the above  boxes. It is  a weird indescribable corny conundrum with actors that I respect such as Adil Hussain, Tillotama Shome  and  Revathi acting really weird with  kinky makeup and hair extensions in psychedelic  colours.Shome plays  some kind of a tawaif in a vampire’s  body. She prances  around doing a Mujra of  mayhem that seems  choreographed by  a mad yoga instructor.

The actors may have done  it to let their  hair down. But  it’s the audience they are really letting down.

Revathi…I can only sympathize with her.  Lady, what had gotten into you ? What  had gotten into all the actors  and technicians  who agreed to be part of  writer-director  Pratim Das Gupta’s underground world of  toothy  vampires sucking the  blood out of their victims,the  biggest casualty being the  storytelling that gets progressively trapped  into a  corner  as  the writer-director takes  his  characters on a journey into darkness Christopher Lee would have rejected on  offer.

Who can  fall for this utterly incoherent dance beyond death , unless fed some mind-numbing serum,which after consumption  makes  sense of  nonsense?Or  perhaps those who share the intellectual  pretensions of this  writer-director? For pretentious and phoney , this series certainly is.

Hats off to the   actors for saying their hazy lines with a  straight face. And  Lifetime Achievement awards  for those who can actually sit through this muddled  love story about  an unlikely love  that grows between a bloodthirsty vampire  Rumi(Tanya Maniktala, who finally seems to have found a  suitable boy) and  Roy(Shantanu  Maheshwari who bears a canny resemblance  to Bharat Bhushan in Baiju Bawra).

The two actors are  interesting. Their vampirical love story, I am afraid, is not. I am  surprised at  how  seriously the writer-director takes  this weird kinky tale  about underground half-humans  who get  squirrely after sucking on  others’ blood. Talk about a  pain in the neck! The  only actor from the gallery of  competent players who  survives  the fanged fatuousness is  Sikandar Kher. This  actor never fails to  make an impression, even when  the stakes are  heavily weighed against him.It can’t get any heavier than this.