General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Bhram

Bhram is an Indian Hindi-language psychological thriller web series produced for the streaming platform ZEE5, starring Kalki Koechlin as a novelist with post-traumatic stress disorder whose visions of a dead girl draw her into a two-decade-old mystery. The eight-episode series was written by K Hari Kumar, directed by Sangeeth Sivan, and announced in July 2019 as ZEE5's next women-centric story after Kaafir.¹ It is based on K Hari Kumar's 2018 novel, reported as The Wrong Side Of Her by The New Indian Express and as The Other Side of Her by ZEE5's own news portal.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Format	Eight-episode Hindi-language scripted web series, a ZEE5 Original psychological thriller¹
Lead cast	Kalki Koechlin (Alisha Khanna), Sanjay Suri (Peter Paul), Bhumika Chawla (Ankita Paul), Eijaz Khan (Pradeep Choudary)⁴
Creative team	Written by K Hari Kumar; directed by Sangeeth Sivan¹
Source	K Hari Kumar's 2018 novel, reported as The Wrong Side Of Her and as The Other Side of Her²^•³
Release	ZEE5 lists 24 October 2019; IMDb lists September 18, 2019 (India)⁴^•⁵
Languages	Hindi audio with Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam dubs; English subtitles⁴
Reception	IMDb rating 6.3/10 from about 420 votes; The New Indian Express gave 2 stars⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Premise and plot

The story follows Alisha Khanna, a bestselling romance novelist who survives a car accident that kills her husband and, in the account Koechlin gave in an interview, her unborn child. After six months in psychiatric care she moves to her sister Ankita's hillside home near Shimla to recover, and begins seeing a mysterious girl whom others cannot see.⁴^•⁸ At first she dismisses the visions as hallucinations caused by her PTSD, but she learns that the girl died twenty years earlier, and, on the pretext of writing a book, she investigates and finds evidence pointing to prominent local people, who then begin dying one by one.⁵

The narrative alternates between the present and events twenty years earlier, when school students went missing in the woods. It also introduces a mythical one-horned forest creature called Ukara (also spelled Ukala), regarded by local residents as both a demon and a savior.⁹^•¹⁰ Episode titles run from "The Porter Hill Murder" through "Help Me", "Down the Cursed Road", "The Guilt", "The Drowning", "Haunted Memory Lane", "Skeletons in the Cupboard", and the finale "The King of the Jungle", with individual episodes running roughly 21 to 26 minutes.¹¹

Writer K Hari Kumar, interviewed about the series, described the structural approach: characters fighting inner demons before the external conflict begins, details seeded in the exposition for use as red herrings, narrative hooks at the start of each episode, and a cliffhanger for every episode. He said the team originally planned to open the first episode with a murder in the woods but chose a car crash instead.¹²

Cast and characters

Kalki Koechlin plays Alisha Khanna, the novelist at the center of the story. Sanjay Suri plays her brother-in-law Peter Paul, a role he described as light-hearted, and Bhumika Chawla plays her sister Ankita Paul. Eijaz Khan plays Pradeep Choudary.⁴^•² The wider cast includes Omkar Kapoor as Alisha's husband Yash Khanna, along with Satyadeep Mishra, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Vikram Kochhar, Raj Zutshi, Sangita Ghosh, Anjali Tatrari as Ayesha Sayyed, and Mir Sarwar.⁹^•⁷^•⁵

Koechlin prepared for the role by reading real-life accounts of accident survivors who could not recall their accidents because of trauma, in which sensory details such as a smell or a piece of clothing trigger memories. She described the character as complex and technical to play, and said the series is "more of a psychological thriller than a horror story".⁸

Production

ZEE5 announced the series on July 17, 2019, with shooting beginning that week and the first schedule in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh.¹ Koechlin was in her first trimester of pregnancy during the forest shoots, and she described difficult conditions, including rain toward the end of the schedule and night shoots in the forest, with pressure to finish quickly both because of her pregnancy and because ZEE wanted the series released soon.²

The release date is reported differently across sources: ZEE5's own platform pages list 24 October 2019, while IMDb lists September 18, 2019, and ZEE5's news portal wrote in September 2019 that the series would start streaming on September 18.⁴^•⁵^•¹⁰ TVmaze records the series as ended, with the final episode airing October 24, 2019.¹³

Reception

The New Indian Express gave the series two stars and called Koechlin's "eerie performance the only saving grace", praising her ability to make invisible forces palpable while finding the other characters hazy and the unraveling of the plot unconvincing; the review concluded that the show loses steam after the first few episodes.⁷ A PeepingMoon review was more favorable, giving the series 3 of 5 "Moons" and praising Koechlin's performance and the chemistry between Koechlin and Chawla.⁹ On IMDb the series holds a rating of 6.3/10 from roughly 420 votes, with per-episode user ratings ranging from 6.5 to 7.3 and the finale rated highest.⁶

Availability and other works named Bhram

The series streams on ZEE5, where it is available in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam audio with English subtitles, and it is also carried through partner services such as Airtel Xstream Play and Tata Play Binge.⁴^•¹⁴^•¹¹ JustWatch lists it as available on ZEE5 and VI movies and tv in India, free with ads on both.¹⁵

The title has also been used for unrelated Indian works: a Gujarati-language psychological thriller film directed and written by Pallav Parikh, released in India on May 23, 2025, and a Hindi short film directed by Sunny Mishra with a scheduled release of June 24, 2026.¹⁶^•¹⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Indian and South Asian web series › Premiered 2003 to 2020

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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