Raat Akeli Hai

The gloomy insides of an ancient looking 'haveli', the kind with many square shaped rooms and teakwood cabinets, know a lot about its inhibitors' past, but fortunately or unfortunately, the walls can't speak, so the onus is on a cop named Jatil Yadav (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) to solve the murder mystery of a wealthy and powerful UP 'Thakur'.

A car - seen in a long shot - tears along a highway, its headlights piercing the darkness. The vehicle stops at an interstate border checkpost. The barrier is manually raised. The Ambassador drives through. A truck waiting further up the road revs up and tails the car. This, the opening sequence of Raat Akeli Hai, A Netflix original film directed by debutant Honey Trehan, culminates in a double murder. The stage is set for a killer thriller.

A truck topples a car. The truck driver mercilessly kills the two occupants of the car, the woman by slashing her throat and the driver by smashing his head with a huge boulder, and later pours acid over the body to leave no traces behind. Soon, the story moves five years ahead with Nawazuddin Siddiqui's mother trying to find a 'decent bride' for her son.

The darkness of night, skin and soul are a source of sin, secrets and self-doubt in Raat Akeli Hai' marriage of suspense and serendipity. It's an odd mix, but there's merit to it in how things pan out for the solver of a mystery as significantly as the mystery itself.

RAAT AKELI HAI is the story of a cop investigating a complicated murder case. Inspector Jatil Yadav (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) from Belghat, Kanpur gets a call one night informing him of a murder in his jurisdiction. The murder turns out to be that of the wealthy Thakur Raghubeer Singh (Khalid Tyabji). Incidentally, it is the day of Raghubeer's second marriage, with Radha (Radhika Apte), who was his mistress earlier.

A whodunit set in the confines of a haveli, during a wedding of an old man with a young bride, where the entire family is a suspect, is a ripe setting for a classic locked-room mystery. Raat Akeli Hai parachutes the audience into this scenario and has a captivating start to the narrative, up until a point where the film starts leaving this cloistered setting and steps outside, literally and figuratively.

The 'chhuris' are out in Raat Akeli Hai, a homegrown murder mystery on Netflix that doubles as an impressive directorial debut for Bollywood casting director Honey Trehan. It's the rare mainstream Indian film that doesn't seem to be in a rush to tell its story, and earns its daunting two-and-a-half hour runtime - deviating from the primary plot when it wants to, and fleshing out its archetypal characters with care.

A haveli is all lit up, and wedding festivities are underway. Guests are milling about. But there's an undercurrent of unease, a 'something evil this way comes' kind of feeling. The groom lies dead, on his bed, his head all bloody. Whodunnit? Raat Akeli Hai launches a small-town cop on a dusty trail strewn with curdled passions, where he learns the crucial lesson that governs almost all crimes involving humans: to dig into the present, you have to excavate the past.