General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Bloody Brothers

Bloody Brothers is a 2022 Indian Hindi-language dark comedy thriller web series directed by Shaad Ali and streamed on ZEE5. It stars Jaideep Ahlawat and Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub as two brothers whose lives unravel after they run over an elderly man with their car and try to conceal the crime. The six-part series is an official Indian adaptation of the 2019 British mystery thriller Guilt, and it was produced by Applause Entertainment in association with BBC Studios India.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Format	Six-part Hindi web series; also available in Telugu and Tamil dubs¹
Release	Listed as released on ZEE5 on 17 March 2022 by Digit and 18 March 2022 by The Times of India¹^•³
Source material	Remake of the 2019 British mystery thriller Guilt, set in Edinburgh¹^•⁴
Lead roles	Jaideep Ahlawat as Jaggi (Jagjeet), a wealthy lawyer; Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub as Daljeet, who runs a vintage bookshop-cum-cafe⁵
Setting	Ooty, a hill station in southern India²
Audience rating	6.3/10 on IMDb from 787 user ratings⁶

Spoilers

Premise and plot

The story begins with a late-night hit-and-run. Jaggi and Daljeet, brothers who have been estranged for a while, are driving home together from a wedding reception when their car strikes an elderly man, Samuel Alvarez (Asrani, in a cameo), just outside his house. They drag the body away and begin covering their tracks, and the concealment draws in the dead man's sneaky neighbors and relatives, none of whom, as the story reveals, is above board themselves.⁴^•⁷

The two leads play temperamentally opposite characters. Jaggi is a self-centered, controlling lawyer who enjoys a wealthy and apparently perfect life, while the younger Daljeet is calm, honest and submissive, struggling to keep his vintage bookshop-cum-cafe afloat. Daljeet blindly trusts his elder brother, and the accident, followed by the lies needed to hide it, opens a rift between them and everyone around them.⁵^•⁸

The supporting cast fills out the circle of people with something to hide: the dead man's niece Sophie (Tina Desai), who comes to town to tidy his affairs; his elderly neighbor (Maya Alagh); Jaggi's unhappy wife Priya (Shruti Seth); a drinking sleuth (Jitendra Joshi); a mobster (Satish Kaushik); and a woman with her own schemes (Mugdha Godse).² Each episode gives one main character a backstory explaining that person's connection to the old man and to the accident.⁸

Production and adaptation

Shaad Ali, the director of Bunty Aur Babli, directed the series. The writing credits go to Siddharth Hirwe, Anuj Rajoria, Riya Poojary and Navnit Singh Raju, and the cinematography is by Vikash Nowlakha.³^•⁷ The original, BBC's two-season Guilt, is a thriller set in Edinburgh, Scotland; the Indian version transposes the story to Ooty.⁴

Actor Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub framed the series as part of a streaming-era revival of the two-hero story, citing older Hindi films such as Andaz, Deewar and Sholay as earlier examples of the form.⁵

Style

Unlike most Indian thrillers of its period, the series avoids the genre's usual set pieces. NDTV's review noted that it contains no blowouts, no gunfights, no chases and no heavy-handed confrontations, relying instead on sustained restraint, understatement and ambiguity, with violence conspicuous by its absence and expletives used only sparingly.⁷ The Times of India described it as a dark comedy that balances humor against the tension of a criminal cover-up.³

Reception

Critical response was mixed, with the two lead performances widely praised. NDTV gave the series three stars out of five, calling it unfailingly watchable because of Ahlawat and Ayyub and noting Satish Kaushik's crime lord, who "hisses rather than roars," as a scene-stealing turn.⁷ OTTplay rated it 3.5 out of 5, finding it engaging but exhaustive, with too many twists, and singled out Kaushik and Maya Alagh as the show stealers.⁸ The Times of India's critic also gave 3.0 out of 5, crediting the leads' nuanced chemistry.³

The Indian Express was more negative. Its reviewer, Shubhra Gupta, wrote that the adaptation never seemed fully at ease with its setting and characters, who felt as if they had "parachuted in for the shoot," and that reaching each episode's cliffhanger became a task, despite a fine ensemble cast.² Hindustan Times similarly called the series unremarkable, arguing that Ooty works for a quaint mystery but grows awkward as gangsters enter the plot, and that a foreign plot transported to an Indian context needs sufficient localization to work.⁴ Scroll.in took a middle view, calling it an entertaining show about the things siblings do for each other, while noting a tendency to link nearly every character into a larger conspiracy.⁹

On IMDb, the series holds a weighted rating of 6.3/10 from 787 user ratings; per-episode ratings ranged from 5.2 to 6.7 across the six episodes of season one.⁶

Other works with the same title

The name Bloody Brothers has also been used for unrelated works, including a 1994 Hong Kong action film directed by Norman Law, in which a developer in Shanghai becomes entangled in a gang war, and a 2007 film listed on IMDb.¹⁰^•¹¹ It is distinct from Willy Russell's stage musical Blood Brothers and from the 1978 American drama Bloodbrothers directed by Robert Mulligan.¹²

References

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