‘Class’ Review – Flashy Teen Whodunit

Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)

Three poor Hindi-medium kids get scholarships to Delhi’s most expensive/exclusive private high-school after theirs burns down in a fire that is suspected to be arson by a prominent builder. The rich students are rattled by the new students and the class clash eventually leads to murder. But who is the killer? Spread over eight episodes, ‘Class’ is the official Bollywood adaptation of Spanish Netflix series ‘Elite’. It’s a laudable remake with a gripping first half.

Most Indian viewers who attended ‘junior colleges’ are not going to find this show very relatable. Majority of Indian schools have classes up till the 10th grade, so a small minority across the country attends private/govt institutions for 11^th and 12^th and leads the kind of lives shown in ‘Class’. Point being? – watch it for entertainment, not for ‘relatable’ content. The makers ensure they declare all teens are 18, probably because of the sexual content, while in reality students in their grade are usually 16 or 17, very few 18 or above (usually if they’ve failed a class).

Dheeraj Kumar Valmiki (Piyush Khati), Balli Sehrawat (Cwaayal Singh), Saba Manzoor (Madhyama Segal) are the three new students who enter the posh international school and are immediately made aware of their class differences by the prudish English-speaking students. Each of them gets entangled with a different rich kid, leading to a lot of complications and bad blood. The cinematography nicely juxtaposes the gilded halls of the posh school against some of Delhi’s impoverished bastis. While Dheeraj lives in a cramped lane where cars can’t even enter, he needs to take a golf cart to the main entrance of his wealthy friend’s palatial bungalow. However, the ‘rich vs poor’ theme along with caste equations becomes secondary to the sexual/romantic relationships forged by the students.

There are a lot of new faces in the series, three actors that stood out most were Anjali Sivaraman as jaded-druggie rich teen Suhani Ahuja (although her hair is terrible, the stylists and creators should’ve noticed); Cwaayal Singh as the uninhibited ‘jugaadu’ Bassi and Chayam Chopra as the closeted Dhruv Sanghvi. Ayesha Kanga as Yashika Pandey was akin to a bitchy version of Ananya Pandey, she does what her role demands, except her character was half-assed. Even though the actors were fine in their roles, their chemistry just didn’t work for me. Despite multiple couples, no pair is worth rooting for.

The murder investigation was done in ‘whodunit’ novel style, with each protagonist getting a chance to tell the tale from their perspective. As the second-half approaches, it becomes apparent that multiple people had enough motive to kill the victim but the eventual disclosure comes a surprise yet manages to be underwhelming. The plot in-fact slows down from episode 6 onward. They should’ve trimmed the plot a little and limited the focus on fewer characters. I haven’t seen ‘Elite’, so a comparison isn’t possible, but ‘Class’ made for a decent one-time watch.  

It’s a 3/5 from me.