At first, I wasn’t excited about Raat Akeli Hai — a Netflix whodunit holding sway at the top of the Pakistani charts at the time of this writing. How could I be? The film looked like the usual go-to gritty crime drama; one set mostly at night in an ambience-laden, rural-esque outskirts of a backwater city (Kanpur, in this case). The biggest deterrent however, was its two-and-a-half-hour-long running time.

In hindsight: How could I NOT have been? For precisely the reasons above, and the fascinating way of their execution.

When Jatil Yadav (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), a man of dusky complexion, isn’t squeezing out Fair & Lovely tubes secreted behind his mirror, checking out young eligible women at weddings, only to dismiss them for their sleeveless cholis or bickering with his liberal-minded mother (a wonderful Ila Arun), he’s often held hostage by his dogged sense of resolve.

Once named Jatin, until a misspell in his matriculation registration made him Jatil for life (the process to reverse it is too bureaucratic), the man we see in the film is a hard-headed inspector who is brought in on a supposed open-and-shut case late one night.

A macabre death at the beginning of Raat Akeli Hai acts as a throw-away opening, but waiting for it to connect to a bigger picture is gratifying

A local thakur (landlord)/politician (Khalid Tyabji) lies dead on the night of his second wedding, with a big bullet hole in his chest and a face hammered in by the butt of a rifle. His dysfunctional family — an assorted bunch of villains, each and every one of them — single out Radha (Radhika Apte), the irate, grave-eyed mistress-turned-bride of the old man, as the culprit. Barricaded in a room at the top of their haveli (mansion), Radha is cryptic and secretive, seemingly guilty of the crime, but not guilt-ridden on the death itself. If you ask her, or anyone from the family, the old coot had it coming. Pity no one did him in sooner.

As Jatil looks around the dead man’s room, he finds copies of Playboy magazines lying casually in a cupboard. Stuffed just as cavalierly on a page with a headless bust of a centerfold are extreme close-up polaroids of a young woman’s lipstick-daubed lips, and shots of her bare back, scratched and beaten.

Who took these pictures and why, or why is there a broken lantern by the staircase are questions no one asks in the film. Their trivial, unconnected details aren’t even worth noting as evidence because they don’t add up, even by a long shot hypothesis.

The police have the murder weapon but no fingerprints, and the apparent lack of concrete proof or motive is startling. At least it is for Jatil, who is smitten by the widow with the growling eyes.

The film’s intentions manifest at a deliberate pace, as if screenwriter Smita Singh (co-writer of Sacred Games) and director Honey Trehan (in his directorial debut) have all the time in the world to unfold the story.

Trehan, as producer (Talvar, A Death in the Gunj, Sonchiriya), assistant director (Makdee, Maqbool, Omkara, Kaminey, 7 Khoon Maaf, amongst other Vishal Bharadwaj directorials) and casting director (with 45 credits, from Akrosh to Hindi Medium to Commando 3), has a deep understanding of cinema. However Raat Akeli Hai doesn’t fit into the usual gritty, rural, thriller genres one associates with Indian indie cinema. The tonal inspiration is ported over from Hollywood, including a tip of the hat to Polanski’s classic Chinatown.

The long running time gives ample time to get to the nitty-gritty of the characters. Dialogues, the placement of scenes, and the revelation of details take some getting used to. Despite Raat Akeli Hai’s long-windedness, one cannot ask for a shorter version (I saw the film with someone who sleeps through any movie, yet was engrossed till the end).

A macabre death at the beginning acts as a throw-away opening, but waiting for it to connect to a bigger picture is gratifying. Much, much more rewarding is the context.

Jatil — played by Siddiqui — is a mature man-child, gobbled up by his personal set of patriarchal-minded convictions. He hates eating chowmein because it turns people into animals (at a restaurant, the camera shifts focus to a man gorging up noodles in a single, disgusting mouthful); instead, he prefers fried rice because that’s the ‘civilised’ way to eat. In a flashback, he stops a woman from jumping off a train because only immoral women run away from family in the middle of the night. In a dialogue, he admits to looking up women on the internet, but doesn’t want to marry anyone remotely modern. Jatil is an amalgamation of an outmoded ‘traditional’ mindset and a caricature of a tough Bollywood cop whose heroics are, at best, circumstantial.

Raat Akeli Hai is Jatil’s transition from a cop out of a Rohit Shetty film (without the indestructibility) to one from one of Anurag Kashyap’s. These transitions take time to process (and they fit well within the narrative), so give them time. The results are worthy of the 149-minute running time.

Starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Radhika Apte, Shweta Tripathi, Aditya Srivastava, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Gyanendra Tripathi, Shivani Raghuvanshi, Nitesh Kumar and Khalid Tyabji, Raat Akeli Hai is rated 18+. There is partial nudity. However, more prevalent are the horrifying themes of debauched patriarchy and general turpitude.

Published in Dawn, ICON, August 16th, 2020