Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders

As we wait for Honey Trehan’s Punjab 95, which is still under Censor scrutiny, the filmmaker transports us to the heart of Uttar Pradesh’s Lucknow-Kanpur axis, spinning a sharp crime thriller with a throbbing conscience. The spiritual sequel builds on the original’s noir aesthetic, using its atmospheric whodunit structure to examine how power dynamics and moral corruption shape justice and revenge in an unequal society. By asking what happens when victims and perpetrators trade places, Honey brings emotional depth to the unraveling of the mystery. Through vivid symbols — bulldozers and shallow graves — he critiques how power conceals exploitation and shields the corrupt.

Franchises are the flavour of the season, and Honey Trehan’s Raat Akeli Hai remains a highly specific one. Once again, a murder mystery is investigated by the no-nonsense, middle-class cop Jatil Yadav (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), with the victims being members of a powerful family in Uttar Pradesh – the Bansals. The Knives Out template is reworked through a bunch of crazy, rich Indian issues and layered with an exterior coating of capitalism in Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui is back as Inspector Jatil Yadav, and in sync with his name, so is the complexity of the case he cracks in the second outing of this Honey Trehan directorial. In the very first scene, Meera (Chitrangda Singh) races out of her house frantically and drops of blood fall on her face. Scene shifts. Inspector Jatil is asked to investigate what appears to be black magic, cast on this well-heeled family.

‘Yahan par hathyakaand hua hai, force bhejiye.’ Small town cop Jatil Yadav and his trusty phatphatiya are back, solving murders most foul. The Lucknow-Kanpur axis is very much present in this spiritual sequel of the 2020 thriller Raat Akeli Hai, as are several key characters, but the ensemble is much bigger, with multiple bodies this time round.

In Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders, a family that runs a journalism empire is slaughtered in the middle of the night. Five members are brutally killed in a mansion built on half-truths and media sensationalism. The three survivors include a grieving mother, Meera (Chitrangada Singh), whose devotion to a shady godwoman (Deepti Naval) makes her a suspect. She claims her drug-addicted brother went on a rampage. It’s the most logical tragedy. But Inspector Jatil Yadav (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is not convinced. As he learned in Raat Akeli Hai (2020), the shadows are stronger than the light in rich dysfunctional families. He knows there’s more. A forensic expert, Dr. Panicker (Revathi), becomes an unlikely ally. He is wired to dig deeper because men like him know what it is to be buried. The story slowly excavates the void between the haves and have-nots. A class-rage drama poses as an eat-the-rich thriller. Jatil chases the case, but it’s really the case chasing him.