SonyLIV’s The Hunt reframes political storytelling with restraint and realism, offering a gripping, almost meditative investigation into one of India’s most defining tragedies, writes Vinta Nanda.

The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case, now streaming on SonyLIV, is a powerful political thriller that revisits the 1991 assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi with remarkable restraint and emotional depth. Directed by Nagesh Kukunoor and produced by Sameer Nair of Applause Entertainment, the series is based on Anirudhya Mitra’s investigative book Ninety Days. Featuring standout performances by Amit Sial, Sahil Vaid, and Bagavathi Perumal, the show avoids sensationalism by using static camerawork, archival footage, and minimal background score to recreate one of India’s most traumatic events. By focusing on the CBI’s investigation and the emotional aftermath, The Hunt sets a new benchmark for true-crime storytelling in Indian OTT content, making it a must-watch for viewers interested in Indian history, political drama, and real-life thrillers.

It was a quiet May evening in 1991. A few friends were at my house. The air was still with the comfort of familiarity, the kind of gathering where conversation blends easily with the occasional laugh. Then the phone rang. The landline—our only direct window to the outside world back then—brought the news that changed everything. Rajiv Gandhi had been assassinated.

The silence that followed was heavier than shock. We turned on the television, and the broadcast, halting and unsure at first, began revealing fragments of the truth. We stood around it, stunned. That night, as the country held its breath, many of us came of age—not biologically, but politically and emotionally. In the days that followed, something in the atmosphere shifted. India, on the brink of full-throttle modernisation, hesitated and turned, sharply and quietly, toward conservatism.

SonyLIV’s The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case brings those moments back—not through sensationalist re-creation, but through deliberate, quiet storytelling. Directed by Nagesh Kukunoor and produced by Applause Entertainment led by Sameer Nair, the series retells the story of what followed the assassination, not with noise, but with memory. Not with action, but with inquiry. And it is in this very act of restraint that the show finds its immense power.

What you expect from a modern-day thriller—especially one revolving around a high-profile assassination and national investigation—is a certain visual grammar: Steadicam or gimbal-based tracking shots gliding through corridors, dramatic whip-pans across tense faces, background elements rendered into cinematic bokeh while foregrounds are punctuated by purposeful slow motion. You expect overlaid dramatic symphonies, suspense-building strings, aggressive cuts, a palette drenched in moody blue-greys, with occasional bursts of high-saturation red or amber to signify ‘danger’ or ‘truth.’ You expect the editing to mimic the rush of blood. You expect the sound design to simulate the heartbeats of justice.

The Hunt offers none of that. And it is this departure that makes it revolutionary.

The camera remains mostly static—locked off and observational. The cinematography by Sangram Giri doesn’t follow the characters as much as it waits for them, allowing the frames to breathe, to settle, to seep into your memory. The lack of movement becomes its own narrative tool. Shots are framed wide and still, or in slow pans, evoking the aesthetic of archival material and the language of early 1990s journalism. You are not led through the series by the urgency of a chase, but by the weight of a national wound.

The score, too, is understated. There is no swelling music to tell you how to feel. Instead, Farooq Hundekar’s editing and the sparse soundscape give space to silences—to footsteps, door creaks, the rustle of files, the hush of grief. This minimalism not only avoids melodrama but transports you into the lived reality of that time. It's not a simulation of history—it is, for many of us, a return to it.

The series is adapted from Ninety Days: The True Story of the Hunt for Rajiv Gandhi’s Assassins by investigative journalist Anirudhya Mitra. It follows the extraordinary operation conducted by the CBI’s Special Investigation Team, and the screenplay resists any urge to dramatize beyond necessity. Kukunoor uses real archival footage—grainy, unpolished, raw—not as decorative transitions but as structural elements. They tether the story to the collective memory of a nation and lend the series a sense of emotional continuity that fiction alone could never achieve. 

Amit Sial’s performance as D.R. Kaarthikeyan, the man at the helm of the investigation, is a masterclass in controlled intensity. There are no grand speeches, no tortured close-ups—just a man thinking, deducing, and moving through the machinery of a complex system. Sial doesn’t perform heroism; he inhabits duty. Sahil Vaid, Bagavathi Perumal, Girish Sharma, and the rest of the cast follow suit with remarkable restraint, making the ensemble one of the most grounded in recent memory. Even the antagonists are treated with narrative dignity—not to invoke sympathy, but to offer complexity.

And it is this commitment to complexity, nuance, and truth that defines The Hunt. It’s not a political commentary, and wisely so. Kukunoor has spoken in interviews about his hesitation to enter politically charged territory. His approach was to focus on the procedural aspect, to build a series that feels more like a document than a drama. His choice to keep Rajiv Gandhi’s image peripheral—almost mythical—was a conscious one. It respects the enormity of loss without fictionalising it.

As Sameer Nair, CEO of Applause Entertainment, shared in a recent conversation: “This wasn’t a story we wanted to dramatize for effect. It was a story we felt responsible for. And Nagesh was the obvious choice—not because he is ‘safe,’ but because he is committed to truth in storytelling. The Hunt isn’t just a thriller. It’s a national memory rendered with care.”

That sense of responsibility is palpable in every frame. Watching the series doesn’t feel like watching a show; it feels like being pulled back into a collective moment we all lived through, and those who didn’t can now begin to understand. It doesn’t pretend to know everything, but it presents what it knows with clarity and care.

I found myself rewatching episodes three, four, and five—something I never do. Not because the show is confusing or cryptic, but because it draws you in with such emotional detail that you need to sit with it, absorb it, understand what you missed while processing what you already know. And that, more than any chase sequence or explosive reveal, is what gives the series its grip.

In the age of algorithm-driven spectacle, The Hunt is an outlier. It chooses memory over momentum, inquiry over intensity, truth over theatrics. For those who lived through the assassination, it is a mirror. For those who did not, it is a vital reconstruction. And for everyone, it is a reminder—of what India lost, and of how long healing can take when the wound is national.

It is not merely content. It is cinema with a conscience.