Student Of The Year: After Dark
If Tiger Shroff dressed up in a Spiderman suit in SOTY 2 wasn’t enough horror, now we have Student Of The Year: After Dark, a twisted turn on the otherwise sunshine young-adult romance franchise. There are no dance numbers introducing the characters or chiffon sarees swaying against white, cold hills. In fact, the central character whose death rolls the series is fished out of an ice lake, drowned and frozen. Darkly ironic.
Cast: Shanaya Kapoor, Sheeba Chadha, Vivek Gomber and Neeraj Kabi
Director: Reema Maya
Streamer: Jio Hotstar
Aayesha Malik (Shanaya Kapoor) was the typical It girl of the elite St. Teresa’s Heritage School. After her popsicled body is found, her emo twin Aditi (also played by Shanaya) takes it upon herself to play detective and find the killer. Her suspects are Aayesha’s annoyingly bubbly best friend Tara (Manya Grover), easily-raged boyfriend Sid (Divik Sharma), one-sided lover Rehaan (Abhinav Singh), and psycho roommate Babydoll (Deeya Damini). Aayesha was found wearing a red tracksuit which isn’t part of Teresa’s uniform and this detail leads Aditi to the eponymous Student Of The Year competition, a literally underground, secret, after hours game show happening in school premises. The prize? A swift elevator to “success”--A membership in a group of elites who control everything from “big corporate to big tech”. Basically, the Illuminati and all you have to do is be good at paintball.
SOTY: After Dark feels like an unnecessary addition to the franchise. It’s a bad cocktail mix of 13 Reasons Why and Squid Game. Everything seems stretched, exasperating and plain snooze-worthy. We never know enough about either Aditi or Aayesha to connect with them. The other characters are also quite stock, versions of whom are overdone in many American teen thrillers. The best friend Tara acts like a Japanese cutesy-evil girl (her Hello Kitty mannerisms reminded me of Gogo Yubari, the sadistic schoolgirl in Kill Bill). Sid is a watered-down take on Varun Dhawan’s character from SOTY 1, trying to match up to his father’s expectations while Babydoll seemed like a Komal Chautala (the tomboy from Chak De! India) reprise.
The whole competition business too takes you out of the central mystery. The games themselves are uninteresting, preposterous, even comic (one of them requires contestants to run on a wheel like a lab rat). This show seems to have been designed for second screen viewing because the voiceover in the initial episodes doesn’t know when to stop. Aditi’s whole thought process and the investigation is shown on screen as a graphical list. Handholding the viewer to the utmost degree.
SOTY: After Dark doesn’t even fall in the bracket of so-bad-it’s-good. It’s plain boring at instances and the reveals can’t seem to pique your interest. After a while I lost track of the plot and wanted it to get over with. For a school, there is not one scene that unfolds during a class. The show is set in a world where a mere school and its unnamed trustees can sway a police investigation and the media doesn’t exist. Most characters are insufferable and seem to be thought up at some Bandra café in conversations over macha lattes. SOTY is content slop that feels unnecessary, more brain numbing than pouring an ice-bucket over your head.