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In an interview leading up to the release of his new film, Netflix’s Murder Mubarak, director Homi Adajania thought it wise to describe it as ‘convoluted’. Like any sensible observer, your first instinct would be to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he’d misspoken. Why would any filmmaker call their movie convoluted? But then, a few minutes later, Adajania said it again. “It’s extremely convoluted; it’s not a simple murder mystery,” he told Film Companion. Uh-oh.
And as it turns out, he was right. With its large cast of characters and an odd structure that disorients more than disarms, Murder Mubarak offers a crash course in how not to tell a mystery story. It’s so insecure of both its own and the audience’s ability to keep up that it introduces each character with bold onscreen text bearing their names. One guy is introduced twice. Of course, all of it is pointless, because not a single person would be able to remember the names of any of these people, except perhaps the character played by Sara Ali Khan. But that’s only because she goes by — get this — Bambi Todi. Fun. You’re probably going to end up calling the rest of them by the actors’ names, like, ‘Oh, Vijay Varma is being a creep’, or, ‘Dimple Kapadia is acting suspicious’, and also, ‘Pankaj Tripathi is going to solve this’. And you know what? That’s okay. We all know, for instance, that Kajol was the killer. But does anybody remember who she played?
Murder Mubarak wastes a lot of time on stuff like this, while it should’ve been setting the tone, establishing stakes, and most importantly, not messing with the time-honoured structure of the genre. And because it has already introduced each character in such an attention-grabbing fashion, when it is revealed that the opening scene was something of a flashback, the movie feels compelled to basically re-introduce to everybody again. This is also when it’s revealed that the person we’d been led to believe was murdered is still alive — oooh — and that a different person had been killed instead. Way to snatch away the shards of sympathy that we’d just begun to develop at the sight of a passed-out Brijendra Kala.
But Murder Mubarak isn’t the only convoluted mystery in existence, is it? Why, then, are some other movies — Under the Silver Lake, Donnie Darko, even Memento — more compelling? The answer is rather simple. Craft. You see, the grammar of murder mysteries is so deeply ingrained in our minds that it’s difficult to rewrite the rule-book. And while Murder Mubarak has a quirky detective (played by Pankaj Tripathi) who conducts a series of interrogations with the colourful suspects before arriving at the denouement, Adajania’s storytelling remains curiously scratchy.
For instance, scenes in Murder Mubarak aren’t separated by conventional transitions. We aren’t shown any establishing shots, which means that we enter virtually ever scene in a state of confusion. Literally where are we now? Who has the upper hand? Did the detective visit the suspect or did the suspect come crawling to the detective? All of this is vital information. We also don’t ever see characters arriving at or leaving a particular location. Scenes begin and end in rooms, with everybody just sitting around. There is no playfulness in the blocking, which means that everything is communicated via dialogue — it’s the most boring thing that a movie like this could do.
The filmmaker Kevin Smith once recalled the biggest lesson that he learned from Bruce Willis during their often unpleasant collaboration on the movie Cop Out. While setting up a basic shot, Smith was told that he should perhaps consider making an adjustment. Willis felt that everybody was too static, and that they should ideally be on the move. “It’s an action movie, there has to be action,” he told Smith, who listened, and instantly, the scene came alive. Perhaps one of the reasons that Murder Mubarak — admittedly not an action movie — feels so inert is that nobody seems to be moving. This sort of storytelling also robs the film of all subtext, because all you’re doing is paying attention to stuff like this. And before anybody suggests that the class commentary in Murder Mubarak is the subtext, let me tell you that it’s not. When a movie has a rich character describe poor people as ‘aap jaise log’, we’re no longer dealing with subtext. It’s all just… text.
Read more – Neeyat: Vidya Balan’s murder mystery proves that creative bankruptcy isn’t limited to the likes of Adipurush
For all the complaints that audiences have had with Kenneth Branagh’s increasingly impressionistic Hercule Poirot movies, you’d be hard-pressed to find somebody who can fault those films for a lack of visual ambition. Murder on the Orient Express was shot on 65mm film, the perfect format for the tableaus and close-ups that Branagh had designed for the climactic sequence. And even though A Haunting in Venice was staggeringly dull on a plot level, it was never short of gripping visually. If anything, Branagh went overboard with the gothic horror style, often focusing on mood over momentum. But just because Murder Mubarak features Deven Bhojani in a supporting role, it didn’t have to mean that it should look, sound and be performed like a forgotten episode of Baa Bahu Aur Baby.
Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.
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