The Buckingham Murders is another of those new Netflix releases whose No.1 position in the streaming services’ movie chart makes as much sense as the film itself.

Now, to clarify, the story and the screenplay (credited to Aseem Arrora, Raghav Raj Kakker, Kashyap Kapoor) isn’t that complicated — no matter how much one hopes it may have been. The senselessness is the omnipresent approach of unoriginality that dilutes what could have been a pretty fair thriller. If, that is, the director Hansal Mehta (Shahid, Scoop) had considered giving the film an air of a thriller.

For starters, there is only one murder in The Buckingham Murders; or rather, one murder that connects directly into the story. That murder, that of a school-going boy, whose killer is caught and tried and sentenced by the law, is but a set-up to create a cloud of gloom around the main character.

The dead child belongs to Jasmeet Bhamra (Kareena Kapoor, also one of the co-producers of the film), a police detective who requests a transfer to the peaceful Buckinghamshire county. Soon, the body of a teenage boy is found dead inside the front of a car, in the middle of the woods, which sparks a brief and uninteresting racial stand-off between the Sikh and Muslim communities.

The Buckingham Murders is an unthrilling detective story with little originality or point

The dead teenage boy belongs to a family that already seems fishy. The father (Ranveer Brar) is struggling to restart his business, the people staying at his house (as is the case in most expat communities) seem weird, and the mother’s reactions are a little off (she is played by Prabhleen Sandhu). One soon learns that, that’s probably because the boy was adopted.

The case begins to become stupid. The head detective on the case (Ash Tandon) is seemingly biased towards the culprits that are immediately caught. The two are Muslim teenagers (played by Kapil Redekar, Rahul Sidhu) and one wonders when the film will indulge in one of the taboos that will shock the audience (it doesn’t).

Throughout this, Jaspreet, who has taken a demotion to move to the county, continues to walk around as if she hasn’t fully recovered enough to do her job — and as we see her clinging to the bloodied shirt of her dead boy when she’s home, clearly she hasn’t.

Arrora is the writer of Mission Majnu and The Crew, the latter also starring Kapoor; the lack of thought behind penning the other two movies is evident here as well.

First of all, the title is misleading: the first murder, of Jaspreet’s son, whose case is solved within minutes of the film’s opening, doesn’t connect to the second murder. The third murder that happens late in the film, again doesn’t connect to the second one, other than to shift the film into the climax.

The second problem with the story is the feeble, makeshift motive of the killer. Like the story, it is skin-deep. The third problem: Mehta’s take. The film is a straightforward detective story without twists and turns. There is an utter lack of imagination in every department of the filmmaking process.

The background music drones, the sound effects do hollow booms and clangs, the colour-grading turns the green countryside bleaker than it is and Kareena, when she is not aimlessly partying at a dance club with her police co-workers, walks around the film in an angsty, dead-serious gloom, doing little detective work.

Produced by Balaji Telefilms,

“The Buckingham Murders” is rated suitable for ages 18 and over, and features murders, infidelity, and personal biases of characters against people and communities.

Published in Dawn, ICON, November 17, 2024