Every streaming platform these days, especially the Indian ones, has one genre that has been milked to death: the crime thriller or murder investigation. It has been presented in a million different ways. A lot of them are similar to each other, and only a few manage to stand out. In the span of a few months, Disney+ Hotstar has released three regional shows in the same genre, and each of them has left a mark of their own. Be it Shaitan, a Telugu language crime thriller about an ex-Naxal, or Kerala Crime Files, a Malayalam language murder investigation, the platform is acing so far at bringing some original content in this gritty genre. Adding to this list is Pavan Sadineni directed Dayaa, a Telugu-language web series that was released on the platform on August 4th, 2023.

Dayaa is the story of the eponymous protagonist, a partially deaf man who is...