Neeyat (2023) Review!!

Synopsis – When a mysterious murder takes place at exiled billionaire Ashish Kapoor’s birthday getaway, detective Mira Rao must use all her skill to unravel devious motives as the suspects are Kapoor’s close family and friends.

My Take – With a premise that sees a colorful billionaire having all fun and games with a bunch of a good friends he is hosting on an island, until someone gets murdered, leaving the odd one out clever eccentric to solve the mystery, may sound just like the premise of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022), well it isn’t, at least not exactly.

As the premise actually belongs to the latest from director Anu Menon (London Paris New York, Shakuntala Devi), who along with her co-writers Girvani Dhyani, Advaita Kala and Priya Venkataraman, tries to serve you a perfect Indian whodunit with fun twists and sharp satire. But only if her serviceable plot had better character sketches or strongly staged individual scenes, the result could have been something more, something better.

Reuniting with Vidya Balan, following their well-received Shakuntala Devi (2020), here, director Menon has created a diluted Agatha Christie-style mystery that has its moments and is no doubt a sincere attempt, yet it isn’t engaging enough for one to feel the joy of solving a murderous puzzle or detective riddles.

No matter how forced and hurried parts of the climactic moments might seem, the film is just unable to sustain the mystery until the final act, despite the massive twist or two thrown in for good measure. It is watchable purely because of Ram Kapoor‘s performance and the way it’s stylized.

Sure, it offers a couple of spooky scenes, but for a whodunit, the film deserved a far tighter screenplay, more suspense and finer elements thrown in to work. Making this is a product that is trying too hard to be original but never quite shaking off the feeling that it is treading familiar grounds.

The story follows CBI officer Mira Rao (Vidya Balan), who finds herself as an unlikely attendee at the grand birthday party of Ashish ‘AK’ Kapoor (Ram Kapoor), a flamboyant business tycoon who has been on the run from the law for some time. AK has supposedly decamped from India after defrauding banks of thousands of crores, while some members of his staff back home, not paid for months, and have committed suicide in financial desperation.

Now on his isolated Scottish Castle on an island, cut off from the mainland by a storm, he has gathered his closest to celebrate him. Frenemies that include his brother-in-law Jimmy Mistry (Rahul Bose), his best friends Dr. Sanjay Suri (Neeraj Kabi) and Noor Suri (Dipannita Sharma) along with their film enthusiast son (Madhav Deval), his coke-head step-son Ryan (Shashank Arora) and his new girlfriend Gigi (Prajakta Koli), his current girlfriend Lisa (Shahana Goswami) and a distant niece Sasha (Ishika Mehra) along with clairvoyant Zara (Niki Aneja Walia) his personal assistant Kay (Amrita Puri) and the event manager for the night Tanveer (Danesh Razvi).

However, when AK announces that he wants to surrender, face trial and prove his innocence, following a few missteps, he is found lying at the bottom of a steep cliff. Though, Zara claims she saw him jump, but Mira Rao is not convinced it was suicide. As it turns out, everyone had a motive to kill AK.

The first half of the film goes through quite briskly, with an array of characters arriving one after another. With a methodical build-up and a slow burn, the film never veers off course from its subject. The core of murder mysteries is your desire to learn the truth and although we desire to know the identity of the killer in this case, we are never kept at the edge of our seats by the series of events that make up the investigation.

A lot of the solutions in the case are based on conjecture and coincidence, conveniently held conversations, conveniently discovered secret passages, guesses about identities are all in plenty. As a result the twists never come as a surprise.

Whodunits rely on shock value so much that even if the screenplay and journey towards the big reveal is a long one, the final output, if good, makes up for it. Unfortunately, the murder mystery that film revolves around jumps hoops in an attempt to make you feel the shock but is hampered immensely by the predictable nature of it.

Add to that the handful of characters who are far too thin and poorly conceived, preposterous even, to be able to hold that slippery ground of a typical shtick. And though the topical, Mallya-like context feels just the right hook to reel audiences in, the caricature characters just make the whole experience underwhelming. Even the film’s climax, which is perhaps its most intriguing part, feels a little hurried and convenient.

Yes, the film has its ‘intentions’ in the right place going forward with a valiant attempt to churn out an engaging whodunit but it is never able to achieve its full potential. Predictable outcome, hammy acting performances by some seasoned actors and the limitations of a setting lead it to be a half-baked presentation at best.

You know you are in trouble when a performer like Vidya Balan, whose character is described as a walking encyclopedia, never rises about the mark. We’ve seen her in better form before and this is far from her finest performance. Rahul Bose is loud and unconvincing in his party-hearty no-gooder act. Shahana Goswami and Amrita Puri’s over the top acting feels a bit unnecessary. Shashank Arora and Madhav Deval look lost.

Neeraj Kabi, Niki Aneja Walia, Dipannita Sharma, Prajakta Koli, Ishika Mehra and Danesh Razvi try to salvage whatever they can. Its only Ram Kapoor‘s performance that leaves a mark, whether as an infamous and flagrant business tycoon, a disappointed father or a mean-tempered man. The actor makes his character very believable. On the whole, ‘Neeyat’ is a by-the-numbers murder mystery that falters in its execution.