Bhooty Call: Tooth Pari

 The premise of Tooth Pari: When Love Bites (2023) sounds like the opening to a terrible joke: a vampire with a broken tooth falls in love with a dentist with a fear of blood.  However, while the series is billed as a horror-comedy, and it is indeed quite funny at times, it takes its world and especially its central relationship completely seriously.  That makes all the difference.

Kolkata is divided into two different worlds.  Humans live in Upar, or "Above," and go about their ordinary lives in an entirely ordinary way.  They don't know about Neeche, or "Below," an underground complex that is home to a clan of thirty vampires, led by Ora (Anish Ralikar), but watched over by AD (Adil Hussain), a human who cares for the vampires' needs and enforces the rules as part of an ancient agreement between the clan and his family.

The rules are simple.  Vampires don't go to Upar.  If they do, they don't drink blood, they don't kill anyone, and they definitely don't convert any new vampires.  In return, the vampires can enjoy all the comforts of Neeche, and they are provided with blood from the local blood bank and protection form the Cutmundus, a secret society of elderly but dangerous vampire hunters led by the powerful witch Luna Luka (Revathi).

The youngest member of the clan, Rumi (Tanya Maniktala), feel suffocated by all the rules.  She makes frequent, secret trips to Upar with the help of two of her elders, classical dancer Meera (Tillotama Shome) and former revolutionary and current namedropper David (Saswata Chatterjee).  Rumi is careful; she targets lonely single men and men trying to cheat on their wives, bites gently, takes a little blood and brings back a few vials of the fresh stuff for her friends down below.  She also hypnotizes them so all they remember is a failed romantic encounter.  What's the harm?

And then Rumi bites the wrong neck, drinking a little too deeply and leaving her tooth behind.  Fortunately, there's a dentist nearby who works late hours.  Bikram Roy (Shantanu Maheshwari) is not a great dentist, thanks to the aforementioned fear of blood, but it is the family business, so he does his best, though he'd rather be cooking for his secret YouTube channel, "The Anonymous Chef."  Rumi meets Roy, they get along well, and since he needs her original tooth to make repairs, they keep meeting.  part of the attraction is blood, admittedly; during their first meeting he accidentally cut his finger and a drop fell into her open mouth, accidentally revealing that Roy is a virgin and his blood tastes amazing.  But it's not just the special blood.  Rumi has had a hard life, and Doc Roy is a genuinely kind person, so she can't help but be drawn to him.  Surely this innocent flirtation won't trigger a chain of events that threatens to reveal the existence of Neeche and set Kolkata on fire, right?

And then there's Sub-Inspector Kartik Pal (Sikander Kher), and his father Biren (Anjan Dutt).  Biren was also a policeman but now suffers from Alzheimers and won't stop talking about the vampires he fought on one terrible night decades ago.  Biren's reputation has stalled Kartik's career, so he drinks a lot and is assigned all the worst cases, including a man who claims to have been bitten by a "beautiful ghost" at a party.  While investigating that case, Kartik meets a beautiful girl named Rumi, and steps on some sort of animal's tooth, cutting his foot badly.

The love story plays out in fairly typical Bollywood fashion; Roy and Rumi grow closer, learning to trust and rely on one another, but she's keeping a big secret and he finds out about it from the wrong person, and he doesn't take it well.  Thanks in part to his overbearing parents, Roy is so insecure that he can't really accept that Rumi loves him for him, so when he finds out that she's secretly a bloodsucking creature of the night, he assumes that she's only after his blood, and goes too far in his efforts to confirm his suspicions.

Meanwhile, AD has realized that someone is visiting Upar and wants to crack down, Luna has reunited the Cutmundus and kills a vampire in Roy's office, and Kartik is limping around the fringes, getting closer and closer to proving his suspicion that Roy is an evil vampire who has ensnared innocent Rumi with his spooky vampire powers.

 It's a lot of plot spread over eight episodes, and the series takes its time, wrapping things up in the last episode only to introduce a handful of new and surprising plot threads out of nowhere, clearly setting up a second season.  Still, the leads are charming, Luna is an engaging villain, and the series always made me care enough to watch the next episode.