Everybody Loves Sohrab Handa

Raman and Jayanti invite friends to a resort to celebrate their tenth anniversary. The party turns nasty when a guest, Sohrab Handa, starts bullying everyone and exposing their secrets. By morning, Sohrab is found murdered. Since the house was locked, the killer must be one of the friends. Inspector Qureshi arrives to find the truth, proving that even ‘nice’ people can hide a deadly streak.

Without much ado, the film comes straight to the point. A man, but obviously Sohrab Handa (Vinay Pathak), is found murdered in a living room. For those of us who have seen ‘Knives Out’, the basic template does not come as a surprise. A whole lot of men and women, relatives and friends have assembled in this picturesque getaway home. Expectedly, the fingers of suspicion point in all possible directions. There is the disgruntled father (MK Raina), sleepwalking wife Isha (Koel Purie), business partner Raman Chawla (Neil Bhoopalam) who we later learn wants Sohrab out of their business, and TV anchor Kumar (Danish Husain) of a crime show, ‘Pardafaash’. Like most things here, this name hasn’t been chosen randomly.

Quietly subversive and more interested in human frailty than genre payoffs, Everybody Loves Sohrab Handa is a quintessential Rajat Kapoor film. It doesn’t reinvent the whodunit, but it humanises it, turning a murder mystery into a mirror held up to the insidious violence we inflict on the people we claim to love. The final reveal and tonal balance don’t fully satisfy, but it is a respectable experiment that fiercely tugs at the deepest strings of the heart. To celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary, Raman (Neil Bhoopalam) and Jayanti (Palomi Ghosh) invite a close group of friends and family for an intimate getaway at a sprawling century-old mansion in the hills. Among the guests is Raman’s business partner, Sohrab Handa (Vinay Pathak), a sharp-tongued, unapologetically abrasive presence who dominates every conversation with his acid wit and honesty. Sohrab is perceptive, knowing which insecurities to poke and how to cloak them in humour.

15 friends (an introvert’s nightmare) meet at a holiday home for a wedding anniversary party. One of them is found dead after midnight. 14 of them become suspects. Nobody is allowed to leave. Rajat Kapoor’s Everybody Loves Sohrab Handa shares a thematic universe with Rajat Kapoor’s Kadakh (2019): overlapping cast members, colourful characters, a dead body, an annual party, free-flowing banter and tense arguments, fragile bonds and incriminatory secrets. But the staging is slightly different. Kadakh was about a couple trying to hide the corpse of a man who accidentally kills himself before their Diwali party. This film is a whodunnit that, in terms of social suspense and tonal flow, shares a universe with ‘psychological’ dramas like Death in the Gunj, Monsoon Wedding (plus a murder) and Titli. It unravels as a deceptively poignant indictment of modern society, armchair morality and rage, and the many ways in which we reverse-engineer our values to fit in.