Mai Review: Sakshi Tanwar is the heart of the high-intensity, low-heat thriller

A mother’s revenge is served cold and without any showing exaggeration in Netflix’s Mai, directed by the debuting Atul Mongia and the one-film-old Anshai Lal (Phillauri). The six-part series starring Sakshi Tanwar as the 40-something titular character belongs to a generic tradition that is usually male-dominated and age-conscious. Mai is neither. Therefore, it is,markedly different from run-of-the-mill vengeance sagas.

The protagonist, Sheel Chaudhary (Tanwar), is a nurse in an old age home. As she looks for the reason behind the tragedy, she commits an unintentional act that culminates in another death. As the interesting story unfolds, Sheel has to make sense of the first death and conceal the circumstances of the second.

One crisis is triggered by Sheel’s determination to figure out why her daughter had to die, another is caused by the fact that she is up against a gang of medical scamsters who will stop at nothing to weed out all impediments in their path. A self-willed woman, Neelam (Raima Sen), who, too, has come up the hard way and will not to let anything scuttle her aspirations, controls the gang.