Murder In Khandala
A cosy mystery set in and around a Khandala cottage, seems like a change of pace for audiences bludgeoned by crime shows on OTT platforms. There is crime here and the tagline for the film Everybody Loves Sohrab Handa (On Z5) is A-Moral Tale, so there is also a bit of scheming going on. Mostly it’s Rajat Kapoor trying out another chamber piece after Kadakh (2019) set in a Mumbai apartment in the midst of a Diwali party. For the new film, a couple is celebrating a wedding anniversary to which friends and relatives are invited for a party that turns sour. For the director, who usually makes small, independent, unpredictable films, this must be like a palate cleanser between heavy courses.
Not that it is easy to mount a murder mystery—getting a bunch of disparate characters together, working out their connections, problems and hidden agendas. The hosting couple, Raman (Neil Bhoopalam) and Jayanthi (Palomi Ghosh) welcome their guests that include his business partner, the eponymous Sohrab (Vinay Pathak), his wife, Isha (Koel Purie Rinchet), ailing father (MK Raina), his nurse (Mallika Singh) and obviously troubled younger brother Arun (Chandrachoor Rai), whom the old man seems to despise. There’s Jayanthi’s sister Suman (Sadiya Siddiqui), her put-upon husband, Sandeep (Sharat Katariya) and mostly silent son (Elgin D’Souza). The friends include a professor, Madhavan (Ranvir Shorey), his much younger girlfriend Nazia (Kankana Chakraborty), Kumar (Danish Hussain), the producer-presenter of a sensation-mongering TV show Pardafaash with his partner Naina (Waluscha De Souza) and a psychologist, Chandra (Rajat Kapoor) who is visiting from Canada. The caretaker of the heritage bungalow is Satya (Mahesh Sharma), who takes it upon himself to make cups of tea when the crisis hits.
The characters are introduced after the corpse of one of them, with his throat slit, is discovered by Jayanthi. Her screams rouse the others. The cops are summoned and Afzal Qureshi (Saurabh Shukla) arrives with an assistant, Amar (Saurabh Nayyar). As Qureshi starts questioning them – one of them has to be the killer—there are flashbacks to the conversations and quarrels that went on in the party earlier that evening. Sohab is abrasive and critical of everyone, and reserves most of his vitriol for his father. Nobody actually loves him, except his excessively devoted wife.
There is a lot of busy chatter, a game of Dumb Charades and some random monologues, but nothing really interesting; except for the business betrayal being plotted, there’s not much that indicates the extent of the friction between the characters that might have led them to this point. Madhavan, Nazia and Kumar, for instance, are just frame-fillers here, since they have no motive for murder. Still, it seems like the action is being witnessed by the dead man, who remains seated in the recliner where he was killed, in the centre of the house.
Kapoor uses some of the conventions of the Christie-ish plot, but is not too concerned about details. In such stories, everybody has a reason to kill the victim, which isn’t the case here. One would expect Chandra, who has been making astute observations about the others to Raman and Jayanti, to play Poirot and solve the case. But he comes up with the psychobabble explanation later, when the killer is identified. The inveterate scene-stealer Saurabh Shukla is uncharacteristically subdued.
With his theatre (and film, of course) experience, Kapoor deftly handles the entries and exits of characters within the confined space, which Rafey Mehmood shoots keeping the intimacy of the set-up in mind. Knives Out it ain’t, but the real pleasure in watching Everybody Loves Sohrab Handa is not in guessing whodunit, but watching the ensemble—Shorey and Pathak are Kapoor’s regulars– having a good time. The banter is sharp and witty, some of it possibly ad libbed, because the actors are comfortable around one another.
(This piece first appeared in scroll.in)
