Raat Akeli Hai Movie Review: Raat Akeli on Netflix opens up with a festivity happeing at a haveli which is all lit up, and wedding celebrations are underway. Guests are mingling, having fun at all corners. But there’s is an uneasy calm, a ‘something evil ready to burst into the scene’ kind of pulsating in your mind. The groom found dead on his bed, his head all splashed in blood. Whodunnit?
Raat Akeli Hai Movie Review: It’s a quite a nail-biting Nawazuddin’s Netflix murder mystery
The movie is an impressive directorial debut for Bollywood casting director Honey Trehan. It’s the rare film that doesn’t seem to be in a rush to tell its story. It keeps you hooked in most portions of the film, with right twists and turns. Nawazuddin Siddiqui, as Inspector Jatil Yadav is impressive.
The Story: When Raghuveer Singh, the rich patriarch of a landowning Uttar Pradesh family is found dead in his bedroom, Jatil is sent to investigate. Affecting the dignified manner of Hercule Poirot and Benoit Blanc, he paces about the house, observing the crime scene with clinical passivity and sizing up each member of the family. It is soon clear to Jatil (and us) that they are all hiding something; they all have reasons to kill the old man.
Raat Akeli Hai introduces us to a small-town cop ( Nawazuddin) on a dusty trail laden with passions, where he learns the vital lesson that underlines almost all human crimes : to dig into the present, you have to excavate the past.
The sleuth who operates as the moral centre of a dark universe is a familiar crime noir trope. Raat Akeli Hai redefines it, and introduces us to (Siddiqui) from a small UP town, who has many fronts open: from his own acerbic-but-loving mother (Arun, wonderful) to his embedded-in-local-power-structures senior (Dhulia, good fit), to the members of the family of the dead man, none of whom show genuine grief. They are too busy grousing at a young woman (Apte), who had ‘illicit relations with the deceased’, and who has a special space in the house.
The strength of a movie derives from the way it creates the set-up and establish its characters, and how it takes us down the path to where the answers can be found. Raat Akeli Hai is atmospheric and loaded with twists, and though it does telegraph a few of its punches (you know, for example, what’s going to happen to a character as soon as the story progresses to her), it keeps enough rancid tricks up its sleeve, right till the end.
We’ve seen Nawazuddin as a policeman before (Kahaani), but his recent criminal turns have taken over our memory. It’s nice to see him arrayed on the other side, giving us a glimpse into his character’s vulnerabilities. Apte, who had also been coming off much too-familiar, digs her teeth into her woman wronged: she knows that she isn’t always in the right, but she knows what is right.
The other characters in the movie are interesting. A family forced to live with the degrading sexual tendency of the man who gives them a roof, learns to keep its mouth shut, till a tragedy forces open the can and the worms start wriggling: an old woman hovering over a tightly-wound girl (Raghuvanshi), sons with an eye on the main chance, daughters (Tripathi) and sons-in-law waiting for their share of the bounty.
Like the recent series Paatal Lok, Raat Akeli Hai also subscribes to the age-old cinematic trope that for a crime to be solved, the detective must first be suspended from duty.
Watch Raat Akeli Hai on Netflix
While it is an entertaining thriller in most parts, some portions of Raat Akeli Hai on Netflix feel a bit contrived. Yet, it brings a terrific sense of time and place, and a crime in which everyone has high stakes.