‘Tooth Pari: When Love Bites’ series review: Sikandar Kher brings heart to this vampire comedy

Despite its costume party aesthetics, Pratim Dasgupta’s Kolkata-set series gets surprisingly poignant as it proceeds

Don’t casting directors ever double-check the material before packing in the best? Aren’t reputations at stake? Tooth Pari, on Netflix, is a strictly admissible supernatural comedy series, yet its ordinariness wouldn’t be so pronounced if not for the all-star cast it summons. The primary roll-call includes, amongst other luminaries, two National Award winners and a Satyajit Ray veteran. Good actors can elevate a middling screenplay. They can also make it very conspicuous.

Pratim Dasgupta’s series centres on a commune of vampires living underground in Kolkata—underground authority, if you will. Their leader, Ora (Anish Railkar), and benefactor, AD (Adil Hussain), forbid the hunting of human prey. The vampires subsist instead on unappetizing blood pouches, smuggled in from an upstairs blood bank. Their caution is justified: the vampires are mortal enemies of the Cutmundus, a creed of geriatric Wicca practitioners. The group’s chief, Luna Luka (Revathi), is after their heads—literally, since ‘Cutmundus’ roughly translates to ‘head-slayers’.

Lockdown life is boring - even for vampires. So Rumi (Tanya Maniktala), a rebellious member of the clan, sneaks out every so often for the dine-out experience. On one of her nightly hunts, she breaks her right canine and winds up at the clinic of Dr. Roy (Shantanu Maheshwari). There, Rumi gets a taste of his blood. Meanwhile, a lonely cop, Kartik (Sikandar Kher), picks up her trail. I can’t decide which proposition is more absurd — the Twilight-like love story about to ensue or the fact that Roy’s blood is somehow ‘special’ because he is a 26-year-old virgin in Kolkata.

“You clearly are watching a lot of Hollywood films, my dear,” Luna Luka says. The compliment can be extended to Dasgupta. The vampires in Tooth Pari hew too closely to the western playbook, from skin that singes in sunlight to fangs that retract and extend at will. These are ground rules of any vampiric conception, though I would have preferred some Indian twist to their physiologies. The bloodsuckers in this show get repelled by garlic and silver. Would it have hurt to change it to mustard and gold perhaps?

Despite these criticisms, Tooth Pari gets surprisingly poignant as it proceeds. Netflix’s instructions seemed to be: What We Do in the Shadows in Kolkata, nothing more. Yet Dasgupta is not interested in a spoof, or a modernity satire, and it shows. The series finds its heart in Kartik, an outcast and an alcoholic, and in Sikandar Kher’s modest, empathetic performance (as he proved in Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota, Kher can be endlessly watchable in works of genre, peering through those beady eyes at all the weirdness around). I also enjoyed the little in-jokes strewn along the way, like when Tanya Maniktala visits a theatre in Maniktala.

If only the other actors weren’t so wastefully employed. Adil Hussain, hidden in a white wig, seems grateful for the disguise. Tillotama Shome appears to be trying out for Madhuri Dixit cosplay. Even minor characters get that elite attendance, from a one-scene Danish Husain to a blink-and-miss Kharaj Mukherjee. Streaming has brought a vast repository of Indian artistes under one roof. In Tooth Pari, though, they resemble crashers at a Halloween party.