If it's ULTRA needed!

Ultraviolet
Star rating:  3
Must-watch: Avoid it if you can

If you’re into foreign cinema with subtitles, leading roles by women, separate mysteries in each episode (like several movies with the same back story) and technology, then this show is for you.

Part-time cabbie Ola Serafin (Marta Nieradkiewicz) will immediately resonate with desi viewers on account of the obvious parallel that one might draw from her name. She chances upon a death which she decides to investigate because she thinks it’s a murder. For those of you who are bored to death with the whole murder mystery thing, don’t give up now. Technology plays a massive role in shaping up this Netflix original, turning those involved into a crowd-sourced police force of sorts. Strangely enough, I felt quite nostalgic about the focus on human-computer interactions in the age of AI. Interesting enough to keep me hooked for the first three episodes. After that, I was bored.

Any entrepreneur with her salt would be too, not necessarily because the series itself is flawed or otherwise lacking, but because they would have all those cogs turning in the background instigating compulsions to formulate start-up plans using said crowd-sourced sleuthing as its backbone. Interesting indeed. In fact, I had to put myself in the shoes of a tech entrepreneur to soldier on, and finally soften up to give this a three star rating instead of the two that I had in mind.

Each individual episode with its “unique” mystery factor will keep anyone mildly interested enough to want to reach its conclusion. I’ve even tried skipping through right to five minutes before the end of the episodes so I could catch the climax. But this didn’t work out too well because the creators of the show were smart enough to weave just the right amount of intricacy into each of the 45 minute episodes to keep one guessing. Clever screenplay writer.

The characters and their interpersonal dynamics are compelling enough to make the series watchable as is, without having too much “screen time” — of which there is indeed, too much — all kinds of cinematic manouevres that would get any millennial interested in the series to read rather than watch.

To sum it up: I would not watch it again, unless I’m planning to launch a crowd-sourced police platform that might actually be far more effective than traditional approaches to crime solving, albeit very confusing in the early stages on account of there not being any formal training by anyone involved. Blockchain technology might work very well here.

— The writer is a coffee roaster, vaping enthusiast, cinema buff and seeker of unique stories.