Raat Akeli Hai Film review: A promotional poster for the film. (Image courtesy: netflix_in)
Throw away: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Radhika Apte, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Khalid Tyabji, Padmavati Rao, Gyanendra Tripathi, Shivani Raghuvanshi, Nishant Dahiya, Swanand Kirkire
Director: Honey Trehan
Evaluation: 4 stars (out of 5)
A car – seen from afar – tears apart along a highway, its headlights piercing the darkness. The vehicle stops at an interstate border checkpoint. The barrier is lifted manually. The ambassador passes. A truck waiting higher up the road picks up speed and spins the car. This, the opening sequence of Raat Akeli Hai, A Netflix original film directed by debutante Honey Trehan, culminates in a double murder. The stage is set for a murderous thriller.
Five years later, the action moves to a sprawling mansion on the outskirts of Kanpur. Cradled by yet another murder, the house is full of intrigue of Shakespearean proportions. A diligent police investigator searches the heels in an effort to unearth secrets buried with the dead and in the hearts of survivors – deviants, accomplices and victims.
Raat Akeli Haiunderstated and compelling, is a meticulously crafted thriller cast in the classic mold. It deals with shocking acts of moral depravity, but the film avoids exploitative abuse, graphic violence, and foul language. It’s a genre film about a cop nailing a murderer, but it minimizes worn out conventions.
It takes place in visible and felt darkness. The raat in the title refers not only to the hours between sunset and sunrise – they play an important role in the film’s key sequences and its visual ambience – but also the corrosive darkness of the setting.
Work with a scenario by Sacred games co-author Smita Singh, Trehan conjures up a tense and compelling murder mystery that probes the hideous repercussions of patriarchy in a severely dysfunctional family.
A line spurting out frequently Raat Akeli Hai goes: “Bahaar ki duniya bahut kharaab hain“(The outside world is very cruel). It certainly is. But the interior rooms, passageways, balconies, terraces, courtyards and stairs of the mansion are no safer.
Home owner Thakur Raghubeer Singh (Khalid Tyabji) is found with a bullet in the heart hours after his second marriage. A police inspector, Jatil Yadav (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) – the strange first name, we will learn later, is the result of an administrative error – is sent to investigate the crime. He soon realizes that he has entered a pit of poisonous vipers.
Radha (Radhika Apte), mistress turned wife of the deceased, is a key suspect. But no family member is above suspicion. Radha’s elevation – she is now the first to inherit the property from the dead Thakur – has made her a thorn in the flesh of the rest of the bickering clan.
The hot-headed husband (Gyanendra Tripathi) of the murdered Patriarch’s pregnant daughter (Shweta Tripathi) is hoping to claim her stepfather’s assets because her younger brother-in-law is a drug addict who barely masters his mental faculties.
The family has another branch – a severe widow (Padmavati Rao) and her son (Nishant Dahiya) and daughter (Shivani Raghuvanshi). Also in the house are the brother (Swanand Kirkire) of Raghubeer’s deceased first wife and a young maid (Riya Shukla), a girl who knows too much for her own good.
The widow, still in wedding attire but visibly shaken, is a sitting duck. The family can’t wait to send him to the gallows. Jatil is drawn to her, drawn as much by her vulnerabilities as her cum. But can the policeman save her if she is really guilty and opposed to his orders?
Radha has had a traumatic past. The hard knocks of life only sharpened his instinct for survival. His intransigence isn’t the only challenge Jatil faces. He must also take into account the ungodly bond between his boss, Chief Superintendent of Police Lalji Shukla (Tigmanshu Dhulia), and an independent MP Munna Raja (Aditya Srivastava).
“I suspect everyone,” Radha says when Jatil asks who the killer could be. “Koi bhi ho sakta hai – humse zyada himmatwala, humse zyada trast. By aise kisi ko hum toh nahi jaante, (It could be anyone, someone braver and more tortured than me, but I don’t know anyone like that), ”she adds suggestively.
Jatil Yadav can act tough when he wants to, but he is generally humorless and generally not very demonstrative. As his obsession with the mysterious Radha deepens, he goes indistinguishable from a man simply discharging his duty, to some sort of crusader who crouches down on an intensely personal mission.
There is action in his life. He resorts to a slap or two, hits a man in the face (off camera) on one occasion, dodges a deadly attack, and is drawn into a shootout. But he doesn’t brandish his service revolver, swear in a low voice, or make loud ranting about his intention. All he allows himself to say occasionally is that he will get to the bottom of the truth no matter what.
Jatil’s life is not all sorted. He’s been going for years. His widowed mother (Ila Arun) constantly harasses him to get married. He feigns boredom, claiming that he will settle for nothing less than a “well-behaved and decent-looking” girl.
In an early streak, Jatil is at a junior colleague’s wedding. While he is busy with his friends, his mother shows a guest the photo of her son. Inspector hai, kitna beau hai, she preens. “Rang saaf nahi hai», Answers the girl with disdain.
Jatil berates his mother for showing her photo. You didn’t see how she was dressed, she ain’t my type, he said, continuing to assert that I want someone charitravaan “jo ghar aur baahar ki seema jaanti ho”.
This streak, in addition to turning the gender of the fairness fixing debate on its head, instantly establishes Jatil’s social background. His obviously regressive ideas are also underscored by his doubts about his skin tone. He hides a tube of Fair & Lovely behind the bathroom mirror and uses the cream every morning before going to work.
Substance and technique blend perfectly in the slow simmer Raat Akeli Hai. The whipped scenario is supported by solid performances. Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Radhika Apte deliver bravery tricks perfectly synchronized with the sober tone of the storytelling.
The other cast members are just as good. Tigmanshu Dhulia and Swanand Kirkire (who wrote two of the songs composed by Sneha Khanwalkar, in addition to singing one) navigate with impressive ease. Aditya Srivastava, Nishant Dahiya, and Shreedhar Dubey (as a policeman who often disagrees with Jatil) deliver the goods.
The women of Raat Akeli Hai are the recipients, victims of masculinity at its worst. While they often remain in the background and seem to convey only silent agony, the actors, with their subtle articulation of perplexity, calculated complicity and helplessness, imbue the film with a deep melancholy.
Padmavati Rao, Shweta Tripathi, Shivani Raghuvanshi and Riya Shukla form a formidable quartet. Each adds a distinct and definable shade to the agonizing composite portrait of pain and perfidy. Ila Arun is wonderful as the cop’s talkative mother.
For sure, Raat Akeli Hai isn’t just about writing and acting. The other entries are also of the highest standard. The film is lit and shot with exceptional skill by director of photography Pankaj Kumar. Each frame, composed with a specific purpose, serves to accentuate or regulate the moment and its determining mood. And the editing by A. Sreekar Prasad is so masterful that not a minute of the two-and-a-half-hour film seems unnecessary.
Raat Akeli Hai, does to the genre crime and punishment what Bulbbul made to the fantasy of supernatural revenge – lifts it many notches above the ordinary.
