This was a good good good good movie! Very classic murder mystery, in that it’s all about the place and the characters and so on as much as the details of the central mystery. With that in mind, also be warned that it has a bit of a grey view of human nature. Everyone can do good things and bad things, and everyone has secrets, it’s a thinker of a movie.

This film is a throwback to classic murder mystery plots. Meaning the social message is interwoven with the mystery. What made Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle and the other greats so Great (and endlessly rereadable) is that they took our assumptions about life, society, people, places, and twisted them around. The key is that the answer was always there, we tricked OURSELVES into not seeing it. Racism, classism, and more subtle instincts like believing the “virgin” over the “vamp” or wanting the nice young couple to be happy, all of those make the reader blind to the actual answer to the mystery.

This film in particular takes a group of characters and slowly unpeels them, reveals our assumptions about them and the many little mysteries they contain, until we can discard everything that isn’t needed, until we are left with the central kernal of truth. It’s a great ensemble cast, ranging from Sanjay Kapoor and Karisma Kapoor being surprisingly deep to Dimple Kapadia being straight up over the top fun. And Pankaj Tripathi is the exact stable perspective character we need to walk us through this crazy world.

The location, the Delhi Club, is as specific as any one of these characters and is the real answer to everything that is happening. It’s a colonial era entity that has survived into post-colonialism, filled with folks who are similarly living in the past, trying to fit within a country that doesn’t fit them any more. The detective works out of the storage shed, the place they put things no one wants, that they don’t want to think about. Like murder of a staff member.

I can’t say much more about the film without spoiling it. Not “spoiling” just the central mystery, but all the other mysteries that surround it. Who is happy and who is sad, who loves who, what secrets are they all hiding? The whole film, minute by minute and scene by scene, is constantly confronting what we assume to be true, what we thought we knew, and there’s no way to talk about it without revealing all those little surprises!

So, go watch it, enjoy being surprised, and then come back and join me on the SPOILER review!