Andhera Review
Director: Raaghav Dar
Date Created: 2025-08-14 14:35
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Andhera Review: Directed by Raaghav Dar, this eight-episode supernatural thriller stars Karanvir Malhotra, Prajakta Koli, Surveen Chawla, Priya Bapat, Vatsal Sheth, Parvin Dabas, and others in the lead. Set against the grim and foreboding Mumbai landscape, the show has a no-nonsense cop, a troubled med student, and a ghost-hunting vlogger come together to solve a series of inexplicable deaths. What starts off as a dark investigation of an inexplicable shadow slowly gets mired in a mess of folklore, science experiments, and concealed conspiracies, albeit not always in a way that keeps us glued to the screen.
Andhera Review
The first episode of the Prime Video series Andhera begins with a creepy occurrence that sets you up from the start. The atmosphere is dark, the tension is high, and you believe you’re going to be involved in some weird horror tale. But once the series is launched, the initial thrill begins to wear off. The story becomes confusing, suddenly shifting between supernatural mythologies, half-baked scientific hypotheses, and surprise emotional plot turns.
Rather than layering toward a cohesive narrative, the show just continues to add to the stew, black factions, ancient beasts, and psychological tests, without necessarily connecting the dots. At the halfway point, it’s more of a maddening puzzle in which the pieces won’t fit than a horror television show.
The biggest disappointment of Andhera is the characters. Karanvir Malhotra’s Jay, the hapless med student, does have some moments where you pity his desperation and terror but his choices are madly illogical. Prajakta Koli’s Rumi begins as a character with some quirkiness—a paranormal blogging fan with her own personality—before getting trapped in the tiresome “let’s go take a peek” scenes with no depth.
Surveen Chawla as the villain is great on screen, but the script for her part is rushed. You can feel the cast trying their best to stretch everything out to make the most of it, but the script won’t permit them. Far too many times, they are made to mouth cringeworthy lines that drain the tension from the climactic moments.
A good horror series has perfected the art of sustaining suspense, mystery, and relief. Andhera, unfortunately, cannot sustain a consistent tone. It’s suddenly plunging into a dark, folklore-laden past, and then detailing data mining and brainwave tests. The transitions are so abrupt that they break immersion.
This back-and-forth always makes it hard to suspend disbelief in the supernatural threat. If you’re attempting to scare the audience, the world you’re creating has to be credible in its own internal logic. Andhera violates its own laws too frequently, and that’s where it loses the impact.
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A horror thriller thrives on surprise twists, but all of them are telegraphed here so that you can anticipate some of the betrayals and “shocking” revelations in advance before they occur. That makes everything predictable and eliminates any actual danger because you are aware of what is going to occur.
The character drama also comes across as forced in some ways. Rather than being portrayed with natural relationships, the show forces confrontations and breakdowns for the sake of drama. It is not natural, but forced, unfortunately.
As a Horror series Andhera attempts to blend supernatural horror with psychological suspense. The issue is that it goes so far in attempting to detail the “science” of the darkness that it never even attempts to be frightening in the first place. The monster that the series is about—even as an idea of a good one—is never truly threatening because the series discusses more of it than it portrays in a frightening way that is realistic.
There are the occasional good bits, such as the initial glimpse of the blackness of a busy street or the point at which one of the characters’ nightmares begins to blur indistinguishably from reality. But these moments of genius are the exception rather than the rule. Most of the horror set pieces are exhausting, relying on loud noise and plenty of fast cuts rather than actually frightening.
The only thing I enjoyed was the subtle mention of mental illness. The show also touches on the issues of trauma, depression, and how personal issues can make people vulnerable. This is not a sophisticated theme by any means, but it’s a refreshing touch of realism in an otherwise frenzied storyline. Had more time been spent on this part of the narrative, Prime Video’s Andhera could have been an emotionally resonant experience.
Prime Video Andhera Review: Summing Up
Andhera series obviously tried to be a strong addition to Prime Video’s supernatural offerings, and it has a good cast, a director who’s not afraid to move out of other genres, and a premise that could have paid off if it had any decent writing. It’s a disappointment. Meandering plot, dead-on-arrival character development, and a refusal to build true tension make it difficult to stay with it.
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