Badla

BADLA is the story of a murder accused trying to prove her innocence. Naina Sethi (Taapsee Pannu) is a successful businesswoman in London and married with a daughter. Her life turns around when she's accused of murdering her lover, Arjun Joseph (Tony Luke). All evidences are against Naina since she was the only one in the hotel room where Arjun was killed. She claims a third person was present who carried out the murder and even hurt her on the forehead.

Naina Sethi, the business person of the year, is accused of murdering her boyfriend Arjun (Tony Luke) in a hotel. Badal Gupta (Amitabh Bachchan), the lawyer who has lost no case i.e. the Harvey Specter of London, comes in the scene to help Naina. He gives Naina exactly three hours to speak out every truth she knows, else there's a high chance she could get arrested owing to a new witness coming to light.

Two people are found by the police in a hotel room in the European countryside. One of them, a photographer called Arjun Joseph (Tony Luke Kocherry, credited here as Tony Luke), is lying dead, while the other, the renowned businessperson Naina Sethi (Taapsee Pannu) is injured. The woman claims that there was an unidentified third party within those four walls with them, although no one was seen leaving and all possible exits were in any case secured from inside.

Badla is an official adaptation of the 2016 Spanish movie The Invisible Guest. I purposely didn't watch that film because I didn't want to taint my experience of this one. Despite that, about halfway through Badla, I predicted the end. Which isn't a sign of how smart I am. It's more an indication that this film isn't as clever as it thinks it is.

Sujoy Ghosh, who previously helmed suspense thrillers like Kahaani series and Te3n, is back with Badla - an official remake of Spanish thriller 'Contratiempo' - starring Amitabh Bachchan and Taapsee Pannu. In a season of fat blockbusters, a picture as smart and compact as this one comes as a surprising treat.

One Word Review... Badla: CAPTIVATING! An edge-of-the-seat thriller with incredible suspense... Well-knit screenplay keeps you hooked... Sujoy Ghosh crafts the whodunnit with expertise... Amitabh Bachchan, Taapsee and Amrita Singh, all brilliant.

An official remake of Oriol Paulo's Spanish film, The Invisible Guests, Badla appears to have made very little changes to the original other than switching the gender of its main players and making some shallow and simplistic references to the Mahabharata especially when it comes to the central idea of badla (revenge) and maafi (forgiveness). The film is even set abroad-in Glasgow-because of certain demands of the scene of crime, which perhaps would not have been met easily in India.

A gripping whodunit cast in the classical mould, Sujoy Ghosh's Badla - a gender-reversed remake of the 2016 Spanish box-office hit Contratiempo - frequently invokes ideas and dictums from the Mahabharata. A genre film is thus turned into a cinematic treatise on crime and punishment, culpability and vengeance.

Badla! What a devious little title. Both an anagram and a pun, it fits the suspenseful soul of Sujoy Ghosh's languid thriller to the T. A nearly faithful remake of the Spanish mystery, Contratiempo (2016), Badla wears the air of a cold, civil, old-fashioned whodunit, which treats its premise like an insidious game and characters with undisguised suspicion.

In this Hindi adaptation of the Spanish murder mystery, The Invisible Guest (with a gender twist), Naina Sethi (Taapsee Pannu), a powerful businesswoman, finds herself locked in a room, next to the body of her dead lover, Arjun (Tony Luke). With all evidence pointing against her, she seeks the help of the renowned legal eagle, Badal Gupta (Amitabh Bachchan), who in his 40-year illustrious career has never lost a case.

After an indifferent and inconsistent run, Sujoy Ghosh scored a hit with Kahaani in 2012. The thriller borrowed ideas from the Hollywood movies The Usual Suspects and Taking Lives, and relied on faked flashbacks that made it difficult for audiences to guess the truth behind the mystery. Many lies were spun in Kahaani, both verbally by its characters and visually by its filmmaker.

Dead men quell no tales. You cannot defame the dead, and they aren't around to disagree. Sujoy Ghosh's Badla features a slick, relentlessly twisty cat-and-mouse game played with both cat and mouse sitting in the same room, strategising across a table. A woman has been accused of murdering her lover, and a lawyer wants to get to her truth in order to defend her. Neither believes in the other, and both will do anything to uncover the truth of the other - even lie.

Picture this. A woman and man inside a hotel room are waiting for a blackmailer with a bag filled with 100,000 pounds. Suddenly, the woman is hit and loses consciousness. Next, she gets up to find her man drenched in a pool of blood with money all over him. At that very moment, someone knocks on the door. It is the police. She is arrested as suspect for murder.

A man named Arjun is found murdered in the hotel and the prime suspect in the case is his clandestine lover Naina Sethi who was accompanying him. Over the course of the film, we find out answers to the who, what why behind Arjun's death. For the larger part, as the film progresses, the plot unravels layer after layer. Adapted from the Spanish film Contratiempo (The Invisible Guest) by Oriol Paulo, Badla makes an important switch-that of the gender of its protagonists.

Two dead bodies. Two locations: one in the open, in a forest; the other a closed-room, made popular by Agatha Christie's novels. Are the two connected? Who is the killer? The one who is arrested? Or someone else? Badla, an official remake of a Spanish murder mystery, pulls off a mostly gripping whodunit, something Bollywood rarely manages.

Naina (Taapsee Pannu) is accused for the murder of Arjun (Tony Luke). Her lawyer Jimmy (Manav Kaul) hires the senior advocate Badal Gupta (Amitabh Bachchan) to help crack the case and defend Naina. But Naina's confessions to Badal add a lot of twists and turns to the murder mystery.