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With the help of Vijay Sethupathi and Katrina Kaif, Sriram Raghavan would make you forget Andhadhun!
What’s Good: Sriram Raghavan dropping back-to-back hits like a boss, Katrina Kaif matching VS’s brilliance, and the child in Vijay Sethupathi
What’s Bad: Please refrain from equating this with Andhadhun!
Plot:
After a seven-year absence, Albert Arogianathan goes home to Bombay in the 1980s and is met by his neighbor uncle, who tells him of his mother’s recent death. Albert was unavailable, so uncle had to plan the funeral in his absence. Uncle gives him a bottle of his own homemade wine, which he has christened “Yadhoom.” On Christmas Eve, Albert visits a bar/restaurant and meets a stranger who was supposed to go on a date with Maria, a stunning woman. When the stranger notices Maria with her silent child, Annie, he cancels it and asks Albert to inform Maria that he has to go for urgent work.
In response, Albert informs Maria of the circumstances and departs the eatery. He reconnects with Maria and Annie when he happens to run into them again in a movie theater when they’re watching The Adventures of Pinocchio. Maria extends an invitation to her apartment so they can spend Christmas Eve together. Although Maria says she has a bakery underneath her house, Albert introduces himself as an architect who had recently returned from Dubai. Albert keeps her “bird in a cage” toy, which he had bought earlier that evening, on her Christmas tree at home. Maria takes Annie to bed and offers him whisky while turning on loud music.
She then makes her way back to the wine and they dance together. As they get to know one another, Maria opens up to Jerome—who was once her boyfriend’s buddy but has since turned abusive—about the problems in her marriage. Albert also discusses Rosie, the wife of his boss, with whom he fell in love and went on an elopement to Goa seven years ago. Sadly, Rosie chose to return to her husband, but she passed away recently. Following their decision to depart for a walk, Maria writes a note to her husband, expressing her possibility of returning at any time. When their neighbor uncle notices them, Albert extends an invitation to her to visit his flat after they decide to show one other their favorite places in the city.
When they eventually return to Maria’s apartment, they are horrified to see Jerome dead on the couch holding a gun, and Maria breaks down in tears. Albert expresses his desire to stay out of the situation when Maria considers calling the police. He confesses that he killed Rosie and that he had been incarcerated for the previous seven years before being freed on that particular day. He leaves after saying that his presence might raise unnecessary suspicions in both cases, but not before attempting to remove all of his fingerprints and failing to locate the toy bird cage. After being shaken, Albert goes to a neighboring tea store to get comfort from tea, but he’s shocked to see Maria strolling along calmly with her child once more. He follows Maria, who attends midnight mass at the church, out of curiosity. There, she lies about passing out and lands on caterer Ronnie. Albert offers to help Ronnie and wants to use his car while he decides to take her to the hospital. When Maria awakens, she requests to be taken home. When they get back to Maria’s place, she invites them upstairs and gives them a drink. When they enter, Albert is shocked to see that Jerome’s body is gone.
Ronnie announces his plan to sleep with Maria as Maria plays music, serves them drinks, and leaves to put Annie to sleep. Albert is shocked to discover the toy bird cage on the Christmas tree because it wasn’t there the first time he visited.
In order to retrieve her misplaced watch, Maria begs Ronnie to take her to the church. She also writes a message to her husband indicating that he might return at any time. Albert accepts Ronnie’s suggestion to drop him off on the way. Because he witnessed an elderly woman giving Maria her watch, which she dropped while taking a picture in the chapel and placed in her handbag while Ronnie was gone picking up the car, Albert has reason to suspect Maria. Once Albert is sent off, Maria and Ronnie head to church. But when Albert uses the rear stairs to enter Maria’s house again, he is startled to see Jerome’s body in the exact same spot as when he first arrived. Annie, who is sleeping in her bedroom, is comforted by him. He introduces himself as “Santa” and begs her not to become scared. Albert hears Maria sob as Ronnie and Maria return, describing how she saw a dead body and pleading with Ronnie to call the police, which he does right away. Maria sees Albert in Annie’s room when she arrives to visit her and tells him to go. Albert tries to use the backdoor to return to Maria’s house, but it is locked from the inside. He sees the police as he descends the steps at the backdoor, and he fears that they will mistake him for a robber. He thus goes to the upper floor and is shocked by what he finds there.
Ronnie begs Maria to recount everything that transpired in the interim, but they both agree that saying anything about Albert will cause needless confusion. After sealing up the crime site, the police, suspicious of Ronnie, take him to the station.
Maria visits the upper floor shortly after and is shocked to discover Albert there. In contrast to the lower floor, where the dead body was located and where she had taken him both on the second and last occasions when she came with Ronnie, Albert informs her that he has discovered that Maria had built a duplicate of her apartment as an alibi in the upper floor, where she had taken him on the first and third occasions when he came with Ronnie. This created the impression that Jerome had passed away while she was away with the stranger.
Maria collapses and tells Albert that she killed Jerome because he mistreated her and doubted her loyalty. She tells how, when Albert first came upstairs, loud music was playing, and she had laced Jerome’s drinks with his own narcotics. Jerome then killed himself with his own gun in his own hand. She also discloses how, in order to avoid drawing attention to herself, she used to take Annie down the backdoor stairs. Albert offers to assist her. They choose to demolish the model apartment.
They discover Ronnie’s wallet concealed in the couch while doing this, but Albert keeps it and chooses to bring it back to the church’s “Lost & Found” area the next day. Before leaving for his place, he asks Maria to give Annie the toy bird cage that she received as a gift from Santa.
Ronnie divulges information about Albert to the police during questioning, providing evidence of what transpired. The following day, Albert is taken to the police station. He confirms Ronnie’s story as accurate there, but he also admits that he was on release from Nashik jail and that he had not told Ronnie this information. Maria’s version concurs with what they say as well. The police decide to release Ronnie, Albert, and Maria and close the investigation after the postmortem report indicates that the death was a suicide. Ronnie acknowledges that he is embarrassed to concur, but he had purposefully concealed his wallet in her couch so that he could visit her again and use the justification that he had searched it, only to find it missing the second time. Maria reports not having found a wallet.
Ronnie therefore proposes the hypothesis that someone may have broken in, attempted to steal something, killed Jerome, and then fled with his wallet. It follows that the person holding the wallet may be the murderer. While tinkering with the toy birdcage Albert had given her, Annie tells the police that it was a gift from her “Santa” and accuses Albert of being the reason behind the events that she told them about. Albert now turns himself in to the police, hands over Ronnie’s cash, and places an engagement ring on Maria’s finger, suggesting that he will bear the consequences in order to save her.