Netflix’s Ghoul will start streaming from August 24.
Ghoul is Netflix’s second original series from India. It is co-produced by Anurag Kashyap’s Phantom Films and American production house Blumhouse Productions that is behind popular Hollywood horror films like Get Out, Sinister and Insidious. A three-part web series, Ghoul is based on the creature of the same name from Arabian folklore. The setting is an interrogation centre in a remote area. Radhika Apte and Manav Kaul star in Ghoul.
Here are the major characters of the web series:
Radhika Apte as Nida Rahim: Radhika Apte plays army officer Nida Rahim in Ghoul. In a near future India where nationalism has reached its zenith, and an entire community is treated as the fount of terrorism, Nida tries to straddle both worlds. One world is her own community where she feels a real sense of belonging and the other world is her country that has been taken over by the military and extreme nationalists. She wants to belong to the latter world too, but she will always be an outsider there thanks to the faith she was born into.
Manav Kaul as Colonel Dacunha: Manav Kaul is the head of the interrogation centre where the web series is set in. He claims to be a patriotic army officer. He pretends to be more reasonable and even empathetic than the others, he is anything but. He is hiding inside his heart more evil than the monster after which the web series is named.
Manav Kaul in Netflix’s Ghoul.
SM Zaheer as Shahnawaz Rahim: Veteran actor SM Zaheer plays Apte’s father. Without revealing anything, let me just tell you that he has an important role in the web series – more important than you realise. Rahim does “seditious” things like teaching (for he is a teacher) his pupils things outside the syllabus the authorities have prescribed. He also reads and probably circulates books that the government prefers to keep away from the general populace. He is a man who finds himself in a country akin to the one in 1984.
Ratnabali Bhattacharjee as Laxmi: Ratnabali is described as the finest interrogation officer in the entire centre, which may just mean that she is the cruelest torturer of the lot. She is as far gone as any other officer, but unlike Colonel Dacunha, she is honest about it. Throughout the web series, she keeps insisting that Nida Rahim is as much a terrorist as her father was.
Mahesh Balraj as Ali Saeed/Ghoul in Netflix’s Ghoul.
Mahesh Balraj as Ali Saeed: Mahesh Balraj plays the dreaded terrorist Ali Saeed and the leader of the inmates of the interrogation centre. He is brought to the interrogation centre, and he might be more than simply human. The Ghoul has been unleashed.
Ghoul begins streaming on Netflix from August 24.