Kareena Kapoor plays the role with admirable success
New Delhi:
Last year’s Netflix hit know knowKareena Kapoor Khan, making a clear break from the persona from which she built an eventful film acting career, donned the guise of a single mother who kills her estranged husband in a hill town in eastern India. The performance was pitch-perfect.
In The Buckingham Murders, an English-Hindi thriller about motherhood, grief and murder, the actor leaps miles geographically and in dynamic character to portray a policewoman investigating the death of a British-Indian schoolboy even as she mourns his loss. An only child takes away his soul.
Once again, Kareena Kapoor’s performance is flawed. He nails the role with admirable gusto. He lends the Hansal Mehta-directed crime drama a succinct and deeply affecting sustained, coiled intensity.
Written by Asim Arora, Kashyap Kapoor and Raghav Raj Kakkar, the firm-footed film explores much more than the ‘who’ and ‘why’ of the ‘how’ and ‘what’ and keeps the audience on their toes. This is not a thriller that burns and explodes.
Simmer and crackles instead of Buckingham Murders. It occasionally lets off steam but never aims for the kind of superficial payoffs usually associated with genre films that adhere to the rules.
The Balaji Telefilms-backed film – co-produced by Mahila Pradhan – benefits greatly from its measured tone, unsettling visual textures (DOP: Emma Delsman) and controlled pacing (Editor: Amitesh Mukherjee).
The Buckingham Murders centers on a mother and a police sleuth caught in the lingering, all-consuming shadow of a personal tragedy and plunged headlong into a professional assignment that threatens to exacerbate her fragile psyche.
This is Hansal Mehta’s first murder mystery. Working within the confines of the genre, Shahid and the Aligarh director return largely to the nuanced sensibility that defines his cinema. He creates a larger social, psychological and even historical context to elevate the police system from the ordinary.
Above all, The Buckingham Murders explores the meaning of motherhood and not just through the protagonist’s eyes. However, it in no way seeks to define a woman solely in terms of the gender roles that society assigns to her.
The troubled but determined protagonist is a grieving mother who struggles to keep terrible thoughts at bay, but when she comes up with a resolution not to cave she never wants to. decay
10-year-old Ishpreet Kohli is missing. The victim’s desperate adoptive parents Daljit (Ranveer Brar) and Preeti (Pravleen Sandhu) call the police. The search led police to a park. The boy was found dead in the front seat of a car there.
Superintendent Miller (Keith Allen) assigns the case to Detective Sergeant Jasmeet “Jas” Bhamra (Kareena Kapoor Khan). He only moved to High Wycombe. He doesn’t exactly hit the ground running, but he soon begins to see the assignment as an opportunity to put his own tragedy behind him.
Detective Inspector Hardik “Hardy” Patel (Ash Tandon), who leads the investigation, is a shattered man. Ignoring Jas’s suspicions, he concludes that Shakib Chaudhary (Kapil Redekar), the 19-year-old son of Daljit’s former business partner, is the killer.
Jas is convinced that the case is not watertight and that the jailed youth is innocent. He digs deep into the folds of immigrant communities divided along religious and national lines. A Sikh school student was killed. The alleged killer is a Pakistani-British teenager. The city is in danger of being gripped by fear, suspicion and hatred.
Jas is sad and very angry. Understandably so. His psychological state comes in the way of his work. She wants to relocate away from the city where she lost her son in a violent incident. He clings to the bloodstained shirt and the fateful day never ceases to haunt him.
In a telling sequence towards the end of the film, a man thunders that his wife is unfit to be a mother. Jas, who knows what it means to be one, slaps the man. He is a policeman on duty. But she is also a woman. He is not willing to give a man the right to be the arbiter of women’s choices.
Its emotional strands help the story of an investigation in a sleepy British town of High Wycombe transcend the confines of a conventional narrative and add meaningful layers to the story.
There are numerous fault lines. Drug dealing, suppression of sexual preferences, secret extramarital affairs and obsessions, and growing mistrust among people make the pitch satirical for the police.
The scope of the story extends beyond the murders. The focus of the police investigation shifts to tangled human relationships, deep-rooted cultural prejudices and festering psychological wounds that surface and affect two communities and two generations.
The spotlight is firmly on Jace and the passions that flare between him. Two other mothers in the film are dealing with losses. The mother of the dead son has no sign of love. Shakib’s mother (Ruchika Jain), pleads with Jas to save her son from a miscarriage of justice.
How each of them push through the turns of events suggests both resilience and the power of hope. One of them, thanks to his work, has the power to make a difference. Another, confined within the walls of domesticity, is the price of rebellion.
At every turn, The Buckingham Murders has more to it than you’d find in your average crime story. Hansal Mehta brings depth to a genre film, Kareena Kapoor Khan gives a brilliant star turn and a clutch of competent supporting actors – especially Ranveer Brar as the grieving father, Ash Tandon as a crusty detective, Kapil Redekar as the young man accused of murder, and Keith Allen as a seasoned The days of dismissal as a police officer are far away.
All in all, The Buckingham Murders makes the most of its assets and then some.
