Neeyat: Vidya Balan’s murder mystery proves that creative bankruptcy isn’t limited to the likes of Adipurush

People weren’t as forgiving, however, when the first trailer for Adipurush was released. In addition to the outrage directed at the poor visual effects, audiences also called out the blatant plagiarism that director Om Raut and his team had clearly participated in. Things only became worse when they actually watched the movie, which had moments lifted directly from a little indie called The Avengers. All of this goes to show how little respect certain Indian directors have for the audience, convinced as they are that their indiscretions will go unnoticed. But the misconception is that this behaviour is limited to large-scale productions and not smaller movies. Well, the new Vidya Balan vehicle Neeyat is here to remind you that creative bankruptcy is a plague that has overrun every tier of Hindi filmmaking.

Out now on Prime Video after a token theatrical release, the murder mystery initially seemed like a welcome change of pace from the sort of programming that we’re usually subjected to — a sincere love-letter to the genre, fashioned along the lines of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out movies. Murder mysteries have, after all, remained largely unexplored in our country. While we get plenty of psychological thrillers such as Drishyam, and investigative dramas like Kahaani, it’s rare to come across an old-fashioned locked-room mystery. Even as these films witness something of a resurgence in the West, India’s top recent contribution to this wave is restricted to one movie — the rather excellent Nawazuddin Siddiqui-starrer Raat Akeli Hai.

Neeyat could’ve been a great addition to this list, with its solid ensemble cast, intriguing premise, and overall novelty. But once the outward gloss has worn off, and each colourful character been introduced, it’s obvious that the movie has little original to offer. Imagine my surprise, however, when in a key moment near the end, Neeyat drops all pretence of being even a tepid echo of better international films, but reveals itself to be just as condescending of the audience as something like Adipurush.

To be fair, the movie doesn’t do this at the outset, but waits till we’re deep in the third act. This is when it plays a rather familiar musical cue in the background. Heard for the first time when Dipannita Sharma’s character launches into a speech as if she has just taken a swig of truth serum, the piece of music is virtually identical to composer Patrick Doyle’s moving central theme for director Kenneth Branagh’s 2017 adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express. It’s one thing to take a piece of music and re-contextualise it — Neeyat’s own trailer samples the “Figaro Cavatina,” for instance — but the audacity of taking someone else’s score, (for another murder mystery film, no less!) and presenting it as an original piece deserves to be examined. This isn’t an homage; Karan Johar didn’t steal music for Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani and try to pass it off as his own.

Gone are the days when Pritam would excavate the depths of the Indonesian rock scene for ‘inspiration’, or when people like Anu Malik would have the decency to plagiarise from the national anthem of an ally country and not an enemy. But we’re talking low-effort thievery here. Not that Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express was a particularly remarkable movie, but Doyle’s music gave it an unexpected grace. Used as a recurring motif throughout the film, the theme reached a crescendo in the grand finale, when Hercule Poirot launches into his trademark ‘denouement’, and reveals his findings to the suspects seated before him like a recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Doyle’s score blanketed the film with emotion that had always been missing from Agatha Christie’s rather clinical novels. It did what a score must; it elevated what could have been a very dry scene and brought a new dimension to it.

But how did a loosely disguised version of it end up in Neeyat? Two things could’ve happened. The first is that director Anu Menon simply instructed composer Mikey McCleary to listen to Doyle’s score and produce something similar; one would imagine that the movie didn’t have a leisurely post-production period, and that everybody was rushed. The second — and this is perhaps more likely — is that they used Doyle’s music as a temp score, and eventually became so attached to it in the editing process that they decided to create a facsimile of it for the film. A temp score is what filmmakers use to identify a tone for their movie in the editing room, but as the name suggests, it’s always meant to be replaced by an original score later. This is a controversial practice that is rather common in Hollywood as well. In fact, it led to a famous years-long rift between director Sam Raimi and his longtime partner-in-crime, composer Danny Elfman.

Ahead of the release of Spider-Man 2, when Sony started demanding a score that felt more familiar to the music of the first film, which by then had become synonymous with the character, Elfman put his foot down. He said later that Raimi sided with the studio and not, as he should have, with him. “I’d rather go back to waiting tables than to do Spider-Man 2 again,” he vented in 2005 CHUD interview. They mended fences and collaborated for the first time in around a decade on 2013’s Oz the Great and Powerful, and again on last year’s Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness — a movie in which the filmmaker honoured his old friend by designing a scene that revolved entirely around his music.

“It’s the bane of my existence,” Elfman said in a Hollywood Reporter roundtable, after groaning audibly at the mere mention of temp music. “It’s my job to make the director forget everything he’s heard in the temp. I won’t listen to it but once, I’ll never listen to it twice. And if they’re addicted to it, it’s just going to make my job harder.” In the interest of fairness, Doyle isn’t entirely innocent either. He himself has used temp music in the past, and it has often been as similar to the original as McCleary’s work is to his.

As an audience, we aren’t demanding stone-cold classic after stone-cold classic; we’re rational enough to understand that this isn’t possible. But seeing honesty in films certainly is. And you’d think that a film called Neeyat, which also happens to have a song titled “Farebi,” would be a little more concerned about these things.

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.