Four years after his last feature film Angrezi Medium, Homi Adjania returns with Murder Mubarak, an ensemble whodunnit for Netflix.
Based on Anuja Chauhan’s 2021 racy read ‘Club You to Death,’ it is set in the Royal Delhi Club, the kind of smarming beehive where people go to ridiculous extents to get in, stay, and keep up appearances. Right after Diwali celebrations, Leo Matthews (Aashim Gulati), the in-house Zumba trainer is found dead. Enter ACP Bhavani Singh (Pankaj Tripathi) and his aide sub-inspector Padam (Priyank Tiwari) who are tasked with its investigation.
The initial probe reveals it to be a murder cleverly staged as an accident. Singh’s shrewd line of inquiry opens a can of worms, putting all club regulars under the scanner. It’s a diverse, kaleidoscopic lot that has known each other for decades.
There’s the washed-up royal Rannvijay Singh (Sanjay Kapoor), the B-grade heroine of bygone era Shehnaaz Noorani (Karisma Kapoor), the tequila-and-beetroot sipping maker of ugly sculptures Cookie Katoch (Dimple Kapadia), the socialite mother of a recovering drug addict Roshni Batra (Tisca Chopra), the richling still reeling from her young husband’s death Bambi Todi (Sara Ali Khan), and her teen flame Akash/Kashi Dogra (Vijay Varma), who is now a lawyer for the marginalised. It’s classic Agatha Christie. If only it were also half as effective or entertaining. For Murder Mubarak’s problems are many. To start with, it’s difficult to take seriously anything that uses labels as middle names to introduce its characters—Leo ‘tharki’ Matthews, Rannvijay ‘fekuchand’ Singh, Akash ‘bechara’ Dogra, Shehnaaz ‘diva’ Noorani, Bambi ‘vidhva’ Todi. It’s not just lazy or lame, it’s painfully limiting. What makes it infinitely worse is that except for the lead pair, all the characters dutifully stick to their one-word brief.
I like how ACP Bhavani Singh is crafted as a gentle, restrained antidote to the too-muchness that has become characteristic of men in uniform in the current cinematic age of unbridled machismo and violence. However, Tripathi plays himself once again. His performances are increasingly becoming indistinguishable, you could easily swap one for another. So stubborn is the repetitiveness, that it’s begun to feel like he is sleepwalking through his roles.
Sanjay Kapoor gets a few moments to shine but Karisma Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia are utterly wasted in characters that allow them to do precious little. It’s Bambi and Kashi’s love story that saves this pack of cards from falling every three seconds. Although Khan struggles in emotionally charged scenes, Varma more than does his bit to hold it all together.
Adapted by Gazal Dhaliwal and Suprotim Sengupta, Murder Mubarak’s plot is scant and scattershot with too many threads hanging loose. Through the 142 minutes, Adjania builds several narrative arcs only to forget all about them. Several key plot points and characters are woefully underdeveloped—the orphanage, Bambi’s husband, her parents, Shehnaaz’s backstory, or what becomes of the club elections that she and Rannvijay were contesting for. Too many questions, no answers.
But what hurts the most is how Murder Mubarak squanders a fantastic opportunity for a rife commentary on the class divide pervasive among the Delhi elite. It could have added to the discourse stirred by nuanced takes on compulsive social stratification in films and shows such as Dil Dhadakne Do (2015), Delhi Crime 2 (2022), and Made in Heaven (2019-present). Murder Mubarak brims with incredible potential but it barely skims the surface, that too with empty observations and banal superficialities. I felt disappointed after watching Vishal Bhardwaj’s maiden murder mystery series Charlie Chopra and the Solang Valley (2023). Considering the amount of talent that was on board for that project, it could have been a lot more. However, now after watching Murder Mubarak, it feels like a masterpiece. (Edited by : Anand Singha)
