Neeyat: Vidya Balan’s film adheres to the template, but lacks much-needed irony and ambition

In a post-Knives Out world, each subsequent detective mystery thriller will inevitably fall under the radar of introspection. So when Neeyat was announced, viewers sat up and took notice. Given it stars Vidya Balan, who has shown a certain degree of boisterousness with choosing scripts over the years, Neeyat already took on an added element of expectation. At first glance, this Anu Menon film seemed to have everything- a homegrown detective in Vidya, an eclectic ensemble cast with names including Rahul Bose, Neeraj Kabi, Amrita Puri, Dipannita Sharma, Shashank Arora, Prajakta Koli, Ishika Mehra, Danesh Razvi; and a stormy night in an isolated castle. A winner on the cards? Yet, Neeyat stumbles its way to reach that wicked climax a good too many times to leave a solid impact.

The characters in Neeyat

Neeyat is somehow stuck in its own genre predicament- to provide an entertaining and unpredictable surprise by the end of the whodunit. Sure, that helps infuse the film with a sort of context within the structure overall. But as a narrative operating within a murder mystery genre, Neeyat feels stretched outside the real world. Here’s where the characterization comes in. Early on, the audience is given context about the character played by Ram Kapoor, called AK. He is the billionaire whose company is now being butchered by the press for its malpractices, which have even led to the suicide of several employees. So, he has chosen to surrender to the CBI, which is where officer Mira Rao (Vidya Balan) comes in. This information about suicides is clue enough in a film like this, where the viewers being to second guess plot points in order to come to their own conclusions. One of them must be somehow related to the victims, but how?

The climax reveal

The loose ends do tie up in Neeyat, but at the cost of a deceptive narrative trick- that doesn’t quite hit the emotional buttons to create an impact. The flaw here is the undercooked characterization of Mira Rao herself, who is left to observe and come up with uncanny trivia about the most trivial of matters. We know so less about her (deliberately, still) that by the end, when the ropes are switched in the course of the climax to spin in a flashback of the events that occurred through the film, the impact is diluted. This pattern immediately holds back to another Vidya Balan thriller- Sujoy Ghosh’s 2012 film Kahaani, where she played a heavily pregnant woman in search of her husband in Kolkata. In that film, there were enough breadcrumbs spread across the narrative for it salvage that shocking twist. In Neeyat, the focus is far too scattershot to even elicit any kind of reaction. There’s no shock, only placid acceptance.

How Neeyat lacks ambition

The problem with Neeyat is it thinks that the sting in its tail (marked by a cameo appearance of Shefali Shah) would suffice. There’s a certain emphasis on adhering to the template in the way the proceedings move forward. There is no yearning or hunger to reinvent the genre for itself. Add a certain lack of ambition in the way the characters are not given enough space to accommodate themselves into the framework of the narrative. None of the characters from the ensemble cast of Neeyat leave a mark. They are far too feeble or cut too short. One is instantly reminded of Robert Altman’s 2001 film Gosford Park, which had a cunning invitation to the genre of a detective murder mystery, but by the end created its own ground for commentary on the classist British society. In Gosford Park too, there was an Inspector Thompson (a hilarious Stephen Fry), whose wry and bumbling sense of inspection was left to the sidelines, in order to unpack the dependency of the upper class on the lower class. By the end, it became more than just a whodunit; it was a searing commentary on the British class system.

Neeyat, at its best, wants you to invest in finding out who is the one. It wants you to forget what’s happening outside the castle. At its worst, it lacks a much needed perception and irony, that biting element of reference to the real world. Is that a credit to the space of a Hindi film arriving in 2023? One must decide, which will definitely show their neeyat at play.