Tag Archives: Honey Trehan

Movie Review: Satluj (2026)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

Perhaps no film better exemplifies the dysfunction in India’s Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) than Satluj, formerly known as Punjab 95, and before that known as Ghallughara. After years spent in release limbo and in defiance of the Board’s demands for over 100 cuts, Satluj released on the streaming service Zee5. It was pulled from the streamer in India two days later and taken down internationally days after that. Whether or not it will ever be available again or in what edited state remains to be seen.

I was able to watch Satluj before it was pulled from Zee5, and it’s a fantastic film. It’s shameful for the CBFC to withhold this from the viewing public.

Satluj tells the story of state-sponsored crimes uncovered by the human rights activist Jaswant “Jassi” Singh Khalra (Diljit Dosanjh) in Punjab in the mid 1990s. After a decade of local insurgency, police across Punjab have carte blanche to do whatever they want in the name of fighting terrorism.

The film opens with a group of people executed in a field by the police. Two are specifically shot to pad the murder tally of one of the junior officers — the gruesome metric by which promotions are earned. Some of the bodies are thrown into the river Satluj to drift toward Rajasthan, but not all of them.

Bank loan officer Jassi learns what happened to the others by accident. The mother of his friend — who himself was murdered by the cops — goes missing. After fruitless queries at police stations and hospitals, Jassi finds the woman’s name in a book at the local crematorium. The police never informed her family that she died, but they did submit her name and hometown when they handed over her body for cremation, along with the name of the officer who killed her. The government only pays the crematorium for the wood to burn a body when there is a name and address attached, hence the paper trail.

Jassi finds himself with a goldmine of evidence in the crematorium log book: a record of six hundred people who were killed by police and whose families were never informed of their deaths. In many cases, the police refused to file missing persons reports on behalf of the family. In others, the cops demanded money for information on the whereabouts of the abducted person, only to kill them later. If all of the crematoriums across all of Punjab have similar numbers, that would mean about 25,000 people were killed by the cops in the state.

This isn’t what Jassi expected to find when he went looking for his friend’s mother. As the numbers climb and the evidence mounts, he finds it impossible to look away. His wife Pammi (Geetika Vidya Ohlyan) is understandably alarmed by the danger to their family once Jassi makes his findings public and demands legal action. He acknowledges her concerns but can’t risk the justice movement dying if he steps aside.

As he’s depicted in Satluj, Jassi is the best kind of hero. He isn’t a firebrand or a politician. Dosanjh presents him as an utterly normal guy asking for answers and accountability for the harms done to his neighbors. Even in the face of danger, he makes fighting for justice look doable, no special skills required. The doing is the important part.

The scale of the crimes is horrifying, but the ease with with they are committed and condoned is particularly terrible. Director Honey Trehan includes plenty of scenes in which bureaucrats talk about mass murder as a public relations problem. The loathsome Director General of Police, Inderpal Singh Bitta (Kanwaljit Singh), tells reporters that the missing people are probably driving taxis in Canada. When officials from Rajasthan complain about their water supply being contaminated with dead bodies from Punjab, he says that people fall into canals all the time.

Though Satluj is about a particular place at a particular time, it lays out the problems with policing as an institution. When the state has a monopoly on violence, people who want to cause harm without facing consequences have an incentive to join the force. SSP Surjit Singh Sugga (Suvinder Vicky) is a great example — the rare cop so dangerous that he was actually sent to jail for violence committed while in uniform. When DGP Bitta wants to put an end to public complaints without having to change tactics, he gets Sugga out of jail and puts him in charge of Jassi’s local police station, ratcheting up instances of brutality.

The institution itself is incentivized to protect the power it has, which means protecting those who work within it. That also prevents any reform from taking place from within the institution. As Constable Satnam Singh, Saurabh Sachdeva wears an expression of utter defeat throughout the movie. He doesn’t want to participate in violence, but he lacks the authority to stop it and knows too much to be left alive were he to resign. The power of the police force can be turned inward as easily as it is projected outward.

Trehan’s direction of a screenplay he wrote with Niren Bhatt and Utsav Maitra isn’t heavy-handed or preachy. He trusts the facts of the story to stand on their own merits and the humanity of Jassi’s cause to connect with the audience emotionally. Every performance in Satluj is superb, something that doesn’t happen by accident. The film is an incredible achievement by everyone involved. It’s a fitting tribute to a true hero, and a testament that those who were lost have not been forgotten.

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Movie Review: Raat Akeli Hai – The Bansal Murders (2025)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders on Netflix

Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Inspector Jatil Yadav returns in the Netflix Original sequel Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders. His new case is bigger and more convoluted, but the sequel retains a lot of the qualities that made the first film special.

Though this new story is built around a crime totally separate from the one in 2020’s Raat Akeli Hai, some characters from the original carry over. While nothing about that constitutes a spoiler, character development and relationship building is an important part of the first film. For the best possible experience, watch Raat Akeli Hai before this new movie (just watch it anyway because it’s a great film).

The Bansal Murders opens with a disturbing sequence. Meera Bansal’s (Chitrangda Singh) prayers are interrupted by the incessant noise of crows. One of her uncles — I think it’s an uncle, though the Bansal family tree is large and a bit confusing — feeds them outside of the palatial family mansion daily, but their cries sound frantic today. Meera walks out to find dozens of crows dead and bleeding on the ground next to a severed pig’s head.

Inspector Yadav is called to the scene, as it seems someone is trying to send the Bansal family a message. Yadav’s new superior officer DGP Sameer Verma (Rajat Kapoor) wants this handled discreetly but quickly, a request made more challenging since the family spends so much time in prayer with their spiritual leader, Guru Ma (Deepti Naval). When Yadav finally gets to question the Bansals, he discovers weak points in their security system. Guru Ma dismisses the flaws — she says they can’t stop the bad things coming for the family.

The next day, Guru Ma’s prediction comes true. The three brothers who head the family, their wives, and a few of their adult children are all murdered with a machete. Only Meera and two of the grandchildren survive. One of the security guards slept through the attack while another was seriously wounded and placed in a coma.

There is an obvious culprit. Meera’s cousin Aarav (Delzad Hiwale) was an addict, and she saw him attack the wounded security guard Om Prakash (Rahaao). Moments later, she hears Aarav fall out of a window into the pool, an apparent suicide. This answer satisfies DGP Verma, who wants to reassure the public that a killer isn’t on the loose.

However, the head of the forensics team Dr. Panicker (Revathi) wants to be thorough, and she’s the only one with enough seniority to stall Verma. That gives Yadav time to explore a few nagging suspicions. Of course Yadav is right — the case isn’t as simple as it seems.

Even with most of the family dead, there are a ton of possible suspects. One of the things writer Smita Singh — who wrote the first film for director Honey Trehan, who also returns — is great at is keeping track of all the potential plot threads. Working backwards, the solution to the mystery makes complete sense. Trehan includes just enough shots along the way to hint at the truth.

The beats of this story are very similar to the first film, and they include some lighter moments between Yadav and his mother, Sarita (Ila Arun). She’s still desperate for him to get married, even more so now that she knows he has a girlfriend, Radha (Radhika Apte). Given the otherwise serious tone of the movie, Trehan gets these scenes right. They’re amusing, but not laugh-out-loud hilarious. Going that route would’ve broken the spell.

Siddiqui is again terrific playing a character who isn’t yet the best version of himself, but he’s working on it. Apte and Arun play off him perfectly. It’s also nice to see Shreedhar Dubey back as Yadav’s junior officer and friend, Nandu. The rest of the actors are good as well, behaving suspiciously without being cartoonish.

The exception is Naval as Guru Ma, but I think that’s the fault of the director more than the actor. They lean so heavily into Guru Ma being suspicious that it becomes silly. She speaks slowly, and only in riddles. Every sentence is accompanied by a blaring horn theme.

That’s one of the ways in which the shadow of Netflix hangs over Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders in a way it didn’t over the first film. There’s even a scene where Nandu tells Yadav to stop investigating, scolding him: “We could have had a press conference by now, media would be praising us, and Netflix would be making a movie.”

Despite that, Trehan and Singh are able to make insightful critiques into the way corporations, media, and the police all work to stoke public anger and fear, then use that public sentiment as a pretext to do what they want. They also created a core group of characters and a winning story formula that could easily be brought back again and again. Here’s hoping they do.

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Movie Review: Raat Akeli Hai (2020)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Raat Akeli Hai on Netflix

Honey Trehan’s terrific directorial debut Raat Akeli Hai is, on the surface, an engrossing murder mystery. Dig deeper, and the film is about the way men police women’s behavior, creating conditions that are immediately bad for women, and ultimately bad for the men as well.

Raat Akeli Hai‘s opening sequence is visually arresting and chilling. A sedan drives on a lonely highway. The lights of a truck flick on. It chases the car in the dark, knocking it off the road. Silhouetted against the the truck’s blinding lights, a man steps toward the car to make sure the sedan driver and his female passenger are dead.

The shocking start transitions to a police officer’s wedding, five years later. One of the guests —  Inspector Jatil Yadav (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) — stews as his mother Sarita (Ila Arun) shows his photo to a pretty woman, hoping to find her son a bride, too. Jatil’s subsequent argument with his mom is interrupted when he’s called to a crime scene.

An elderly rich man is murdered on the night of his own wedding. It’s a second marriage for Raghuveer Singh (Khalid Tyabji) — and to a much younger woman — so it was a quiet affair. Quiet enough that no one even heard him get shot.

There are plenty of suspects in the house, including Singh’s adult children, his in-laws, a maid, and the new bride, Radha (Radhika Apte). The only thing they have in common is that they all hated the dead man.

Radha seems to be the main suspect, and her reluctance to talk to Jatil frustrates him. But she slips him a note reminding him that they’ve met before. It was five years ago, when he stopped her from jumping off a train, saving her life — only for her to wind up here.

This reminder prompts Jatil to do a proper investigation, rather than pin the murder on Radha like everyone else in the police department wants him to do.. Other members of the household had motive and opportunity, too, not to mention some lingering questions about Singh’s first wife’s death.

No one in Raat Akeli Hai is happy. Crucially, that includes Jatil. He’s bought into the thinking that women are something to be controlled. He’s still single because he wants a wife who is “well-behaved” and “knows her limits.” Presumably, he’ll be the one defining those limits.

The conundrum is his mother. Filial norms dictate that he respect her, and he does even when she does stuff that drives him crazy. But even though she doesn’t behave the way he wishes she would, it’s obvious how much she loves him. She means it when she says her son looks as handsome as Ajay Devgn in his uniform and sunglasses.

She’s also an example of what marital equality should look like, something that he finally appreciates during a conversation with her. As she’s telling Jatil the same story about his deceased father for the millionth time, she breaks down and says, “I miss him.” They were partners who cared deeply for each other and their son. They were happy.

Contrast with the deceased’s household, where everyone views each other with suspicion and distrust. Singh was a pervert, with a bedroom full of erotic art, pornography, and Polaroids of abused women. But he was also wealthy and closely connected to the shady politician Munna Raja (Aditya Srivastava). There was no way to escape Singh’s grasp, so everyone lived in survival mode.

Jatil finally understands that Radha’s hesitancy in opening up to him comes from hard-earned lessons. Though he’d always wanted a submissive, docile wife, her admires Radha for her courage and resilience. Maybe exerting control won’t get him the happy marriage that his parents had. Maybe he’d rather be with a woman who is strong and brave. Someone like Radha.

All of the character growth and theming in Raat Akeli Hai is done in a subtle, gradual way. There’s nothing heavy-handed or abrupt in Trehan’s interpretation of Smita Singh’s smart screenplay. The entire cast has the acting chops to pull this approach off, and Trehan trusts them to do it.

Trehan runs one of the production companies behind Raat Akeli Hai — Macguffin Pictures — with Udta Punjab director Abhishek Chaubey, who serves as Supervising Producer on the film. One of Chaubey’s duties included working on the English subtitles, which are outstanding. They include classic noir lines, like Radha’s response when Jatil asks who she thinks killed Singh: “Could be anyone. Someone braver than me… Someone more desperate. But I don’t know anyone like that.”

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