In last year's Netflix hit Jaane Jaan, Kareena Kapoor Khan, making a clean break from the persona she built an eventful film acting career around, donned the guise of a single mother who murders her estranged husband in a hill town in eastern India. The performance was pitch-perfect.
In The Buckingham Murders, an English-Hindi thriller centred on motherhood, mourning and murder, the actor leaps miles away geographically and in terms of character dynamic to portray a policewoman investigating the death of a British-Indian schoolboy even as the grief of losing her only child gnaws her soul.
Once again, there is nary a flaw in Kareena Kapoor's performance. She nails the role with admirable felicity. She lends the Hansal Mehta-directed crime drama a compact and deeply affecting core with sustained, coiled-up intensity.
The firm-footed film, written by Aseem Arrora, Kashyap Kapoor and Raghav Raj Kakker, probes the ‘who' and ‘why' much more than it does the ‘how' and ‘what' and keeps the audience on its toes. It isn't the sort of thriller that combusts and explodes.
The Buckingham Murders simmers and crackles instead. It lets off steam occasionally but without ever aiming for the kind of superficial payoffs that are normally associated with genre films that adhere to the rules.
The Balaji Telefilms-backed film – it is co-produced by the female lead – benefits immensely from its measured tone, unflashy visual texture (DOP: Emma Dalesman) and controlled pace (editor: Amitesh Mukherjee).
The Buckingham Murders centres on a mother and a police sleuth caught between the lingering, all-engulfing shadow of a personal tragedy and a headlong plunge into a professional assignment that threatens to exacerbate her fragile psyche.
This is Hansal Mehta's first murder mystery. Working within the limits of the genre, the Shahid and Aligarh director falls back to a great extent on the delicate sensibility that defines his cinema. He creates a larger social, emotional, and even historical, context for the police procedural to elevate it above the ordinary.
Above all else, The Buckingham Murders explores the meaning of motherhood and not only through the eyes of the protagonist. It does not, however, in any way seek to define a woman merely in terms of the gender roles that society apportions to her.
The troubled but resolute protagonist is a mom in mourning who struggles to keep dire thoughts at bay, but she is never found wanting when it comes to her resolve not to cave in. Her ability to persevere is frequently put to the test but her courage never wanes.
Ishpreet Kohli, 10, goes missing. The victim's desperate adoptive parents, Daljeet (Ranveer Brar) and Preeti (Prabhleen Sandhu), call in the police. The search leads the cops to a park. The boy is found dead there in the front seat of a car.
Superintendent Miller (Keith Allen) assigns the case to Detective Sergeant Jasmeet “Jass” Bhamra (Kareena Kapoor Khan). She has only just moved to High Wycombe. She does not exactly hit the ground running but she soon begins to see the assignment as an opportunity to put her own tragedy behind her.
Detective Inspector Hardik “Hardy” Patel (Ash Tandon), who leads the investigation, is a man in a tearing hurry. Ignoring Jass's misgivings, he concludes that Saquib Chowdhary (Kapil Redekar), the 19-year-old son of Daljeet's former business partner, is the killer.
Jass is convinced that the case isn't watertight and the jailed youngster is innocent. She digs deeper into the folds of an immigrant community divided along religious and national lines. The victim is a Sikh schoolboy. The alleged killer is a Pakistani-British teenager. The town is in danger of being gripped by fear, suspicion and hate.
Jass is both sad and exceedingly angry. Understandably so. Her psychological state comes in the way of her work. She seeks a transfer away from the city where she lost her son in a violent incident. She clings to a bloodstained shirt and the fateful day does not stop haunting her.
In a telling sequence late in the film, a man thunders that his spouse does not deserve to be a mother. Jass, who knows exactly what it means to be one, slaps the guy. She is a cop on duty. But she is a woman too. She isn't willing to grant a man the right to be an arbiter on the choices that women make.
Its emotional strands help the tale of an investigation in the sleepy British town of High Wycombe transcend the confines of a conventional narrative and add meaningful layers to the story.
The fault lines out here are numerous. Peddling of drugs, the suppression of sexual preferences, clandestine extramarital affairs and obsessions, and rising distrust among the people queer the pitch for the police.
The scope of the story is expanded beyond the act of killing. The focus of the police probe shifts to tangled human relationships, deep-rooted cultural prejudices and festering psychological wounds that come to the fore and impact two communities and two generations.
The spotlight is firmly on Jass and the maelstrom of emotions that rages within her. The film also has two other mothers dealing with loss. Preeti, the dead boy's mom, is undemonstrative. Saquib's mother (Ruchika Jain), pleads with Jass to save her son from a miscarriage of justice.
How each of them grapples with the turn of events suggests both resilience and a capacity for hope. One of them, thanks to her job, has the power to make a difference. Another, confined within the walls of domesticity, pays the price for rebelling.
There is, at every turn, more to The Buckingham Murders than you would find in an average tale of crime. Watch it for the depth that Hansal Mehta imparts to a genre film, the sparkling star turn that Kareena Kapoor Khan delivers and the clutch of competent supporting actors – notably Ranveer Brar as a bereaved father, Ash Tandon as a crusty detective, Kapil Redekar as a youth charged with murder and Keith Allen as a seasoned police official days away from superannuation.
All in all, The Buckingham Murders makes the most of its resources and then some.
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Kareena Kapoor, Keith Allen, Stuart Whelan
