'Murder Mubarak' movie review: Pankaj Tripathi powers this wacky ...

Misdirection. Murderers and magicians thrive on it, and, to some extent, film directors too. Homi Adajania knows his way around misdirection: his debut feature, Being Cyrus (2005), was an eerily involving thriller, its calm conceits and subtle performances building up to a delicious twist. He attempts the same trick all these years later in Murder Mubarak. As before, he gathers a fine ensemble whose florid antics keep us guessing. The only slip-up is that one of the performances — by no means a peripheral one —is alarmingly off-key, drawing more attention to itself than it ideally should.

The ‘Royal Delhi Club’ is as flagrantly obnoxious and high-flown as its name makes it out to sound. Built in British times, it has endured as an ugly monument to class. It has a gym, a pool, a garden and a dining area, hosting lavish bouts with tall chocolate fountains and coloured macarons. Its patrons are all moneyed showoffs, catty anglophones with nothing better to do than gather for cards and Tambola night. One morning, Leo Mathews (a likably scummy Aashim Gulati), a prized employee at the club, winds up dead. What looks like a freak gym accident is soon deciphered as planned murder.

The roster of potential suspects runs wild. We meet fading diva Shehnaz Noorani (Karisma Kapoor), cocktail czarina Cookie Katoch (Dimple Kapadia), windy blueblood Rannvijay (Sanjay Kapoor), and childhood friends and former lovers Bambi (Sara Ali Khan) and Akash (Vijay Varma). There’s also Roshni Batra, a wildly cackling socialite played by Tisca Chopra, and good old Guppie (Brijendra Kala), a trusty valet with dementia.

Who could the killer be? The question hangs comically on the vigilant face of ACP Bhavani Singh (Pankaj Tripathi). If you’ve missed a great Tripathi performance in a while — he was hamming it up in the recent Main Atal Hoon — watch him move with elan and poise in Murder Mubarak. Little shifts in his manner land as comic punches, rendering Sachin-Jigar’s cartoon score unnecessary. Watchful and tactful, Bhavani believes in the art of conversation and careful deduction. As he ingratiates himself with this group, he discovers that Leo was blackmailing some of his patrons. His libidinous social climbing drew the ire of his fellow employees. Did any of them have him killed?

The questions multiply. Writers Gazal Dhaliwal and Suprotim Sengupta, adapting a novel by Anuja Chauhan, keep our eyes and wits engaged for the most part. They spin a funny, self-aware mystery — at one point, the workers are seen placing bets on who the killer could be. Murder Mubarak is perhaps best enjoyed for its visual burlesque. There is a glorious fistfight in the opening stretch and Linesh Desai’s cinematography and Bindiya Chhabria and Arvind Ashok Kumar’s production design are full of interesting gags. Check out the severed talking head, for instance, or a large cake dripping over with red icing like blood, signalling the carnage to come.

Less enduring are the film’s attempts at social commentary. Adajania makes dramatic hay out of the secrets and shallow vanities of high-society Delhi. It’s a social class that has already been skewered beyond belief, from entrenched Dibakar Banerjee films to the two seasons of Made in Heaven. The upstairs-downstairs dynamic of the plot wears thin beyond a point. Despite several attempts to even the odds, the needle of suspicion always rests on the ultra-rich. The dialogue writing is cautiously contemporary. “It’s easy to be branded anti-national these days,” Bhavani remarks offhandedly—satire without the bite.

Sara Ali Khan and Vijay Varma — an odd couple to rival most — steal a considerable amount of dramatic time. There are legitimate reasons for this, though I wish the film had taken its awkward central romance less seriously. The bits with Tripathi and Karisma Kapoor have genuine comic electricity, a stroke of brilliant casting by Panchami Ghavri. Needless to say, Dimple Kapadia and Tisca Chopra are good sports as ever, and Sanjay Kapoor — following up his act from Merry Christmas — is a benign riot.

Murder Mubarak demonstrates how simple it is to make a decent whodunit. The trick, as ever, is not in the cleverness of the plot but in the array of rascals and refuseniks we meet along the way. If all fails, there’s Tripathi in a golf hat and glasses. In one scene, Bhavani explains to his partner why he avoids wearing a uniform. “It puts me at a distance from people,” he reasons. Welcome back, Pankaj Tripathi. We hope you stay.

Murder Mubarak is currently streaming on Netflix