‘The Last Hour’ review: Exquisitely shot series about nothing

There is a lush of coldness that pervades The Last Hour — no, it is definitely not because of its geographical setting: Sikkim. Its coldness — whether in the way characters act by putting a unbelievably stoic performance or respond to their immediate situation with a largely devil-may-care attitude, or its icy premise that screams for some friction — stems from a place of nothingness and makes you feel alienated from the proceedings, even if you try, genuinely try, to make an effort to navigate through a premise that could only be described dead on arrival.

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If the writing suffers from the onslaught of this cold treatment, it is another thing that scenes pile up one after the other without much thought, often leaving us with a sense of deja vu, in the manner with which certain scenes are constructed as if they were stuck in an infinite time loop. That should perhaps answer your question about whether The Last Hour is worthwhile.

The series flirts with the idea of time and uses it for the world building exercise. Time is what is its serious problem, for The Last Hour does not boast of a material that would hold your interest for eight episodes, in what could have otherwise been a tighter feature film in under two hours. For your question on what’s new, though, there is an answer: jhakri (shaman), apart from the good decision to cast predominantly North-East actors.

What gets the series going is a shaman, Dev (Karma Takapa, the only actor who belongs to the milieu, although the series does not answer why Takapa, for the most part, looks as if he suffers from flatulence), with mystical powers that also include talking to wandering souls and letting them cross the sea to the other world.

Anyway, back to the point, Dev talks to spirits which could well be added to his LinkedIn bio. It’s a skill he inherited from his mother, the Mother Superior of Shamans, who warns him about the evil Yama Nadu (Robin Tamang), in his pursuit to grab Dev’s superpower: revisiting a person’s last hour and re-constructing it to find the missing pieces. Oh, there is also Sanjay Kapoor as Arup Singh, a police officer in charge of a series of mysterious deaths and rapes happening in the State. Arup and Dev make a formidable pair, in their fight to nab Yama Nadu.

There are other things that we would like the viewers to watch and deduce. Like the supremely dull romantic episode between Dev and Arup Singh’s daughter, Pari (Shaylee Kishen), the only one who could see Dev and talk to him, in his transcendental state. Or the backstory about how Arup’s wife died. Or the dreamy, sepia-tinted after- life portion involving Dev and a boat. The Last Hour raises a critical question revisiting the events of the past, to change the future. By the time it arrives, there is too much time that has been wasted and the gaps yet remain.

The Last Hour is currently streaming on Amazon Prime