Let me begin with a confession. I struggled to stay awake in Hansal Mehta’s The Buckingham Murders. To be fair, I’d walked into the film with great expectation for a moodysportsplus ph, slow-burn. The setup invites this possibility. Detective Sergeant Jasmeet “Jass” Bhamra (Kareena Kapoor) has just been transferred to High Wycombe. She’s in the throes of a personal tragedy, having just lost her son in a shootout. The screenplay defines her solely by this loss. It becomes the excuse to dole out scattered flashbacks to the fateful night of her son’s killing, as well as glimpses of happier mother-son days which look plucked from some bright, artfully fake commercial.

The minute Bhamra moves to Wycombe, she’s assigned the investigation of a missing child. She’s reluctant initially, her grief still too raw. The missing child, Ishpreet, is around the age of her own dead son. But, as Superintendent Miller reiterates twice in the film, private reservations have to be chucked when duty calls. Leading the investigation is Inspector Hardik “Hardy” Patel (Ash Tandon), who’s rather quick and eager to close the case even when the apprehended suspect’s confession seems too convenient and loopholes riddle the proceedings. He wants to steward the case all by himself, snapping at Bhamra who has her doubts. Is he hiding something? The town is his turf. He directs Bhamra to keep her nose out.

However, too many pieces of the puzzle don’t fit, the needle of suspicion pointing to the unexplored probable. Ishpreet’s adoptive father, Daljeet (Ranveer Brar), has a barely disguised streak of violence. The mother, Preeti (Prabhleen Sandhu), stays wound up in fear of Daljeet, who doesn’t even let her speak. He also seems to be having an affair. Secrets run aplenty throughout the film, including covert drug peddling rings which the town’s children have got sucked in.

BY Debanjan Dhar

But Mehta pummels every ounce of suspense, any tinge of nervous anticipation, out of the film. So, the background music works furiously to ratchet up tension. It’s so loud, so intrusive it drowns out chunks of dialogue. A crackling thriller should possess an air of challenge, capable of hurling a bunch of dares at us. Some presence of personality goes a long way in making a familiar story fresh. The problem with The Buckingham Murders is that either it is stale-a grieving parent-cop as protagonist-or a needless scramble of hot-button points like Sikh-Muslim communal clashes belying family feuds. Neither does the screenplay, written by Aseem Arrora, Raghav Raj Kakker and Kashyap Kapoor, limn the Wycombe setting. Just as Asians are sidetracked in mainstream Hollywood productions, the white characters in The Buckingham Murders are inconsequential.

In terms of basic mystery construction, even if the slant here is more sombre, the film stumbles under rookie mistakes. Mehta fumbles in hewing a study of communal tension into the fabric of the thriller. The immigrant communities of Sikhs and Muslims occupy centre stage in the film but the scuffle between them is bizarrely corralled around the fallout between Daljeet and his former Pakistani business partner, Saleem. The film insinuates both the communities’ old ties to local power, even a possible influence of the imam on the superintendent himself. What could have been an intriguing thread shunts to a passing suggestion. Both communities lob threats at each other but the film ties them up in a toothless manner.

All sorts of indulgences pile up, stifling momentum. A Rekha Bhardwaj melancholic ballad randomly pops up and stalls the narrative. Melodramatic stretches and clashes between the two communities come up without satisfyingly advancing the plot. The drama’s noticeable acceleration of pace in the second half never kindles urgency. It hinges too much on Kapoor to lend it dynamism and force.

Kapoor has always been an eminently watchable star. But I am not sure if this film is smart enough to either incorporate her aura in a less star-struck fashion or that everything in the film, other characters and multiple strands get summarily eclipsed by how she’s positioned. The Buckingham Murders isn’t even a taut character study. Bhamra is drawn in too broad strokes to make us care for her. Mehta conceives the character with predictability; of course, the case turns into a rite of passage for Bhamra to excise her sorrow and gather resolution.

BY Debanjan Dhar

Kapoor’s performance encompasses a whole lot of intense glowering and heavy-shouldered grit. To buttress the unblinking solemnity of her pose, we get close-ups of her fists clenching, furrowed brows. The mix of weariness and steeliness would have fared well had the film fussed less on designing the emotional beats of too many scenes to furnish her absolute psychological immersion.

The Buckingham Murders ultimately trips on an extended twist-laden climax that doesn’t do itself any favours by bunging in a matter of one’s most intimate identity as crucial to the secret. In how many more Indian films and shows will queerness be viewed through the lens of a spoiler? Last year’s Netflix seriessportsplus ph, Kohrra, was also guilty of this. It’s a sorry example of irresponsible, misguided ideas coded into the storytelling, further diminishing the thriller.

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