2.5 Stars (out of 4)
Watch Everybody Loves Sohrab Handa on Zee5
A celebratory get-together turns deadly in the engaging whodunit Everybody Loves Sohrab Handa. Actor-writer-director Rajat Kapoor confines his suspects to a single location, elevating the drama in this murder mystery.
The title is ironic, of course. The film opens with the discovery of Sohrab Handa’s (Vinay Pathak) body, dead in the living room of his vacation home from a slit throat. His friend Jayanti’s (Palomi Ghosh) screams wake the dozen others in the house, all of whom had gathered to celebrate her ten-year anniversary with Raman (Neil Bhoopalam).
Raman calls the local police, led by Inspector Qureshi (Saurabh Shukla), who initially assumes Raman is the culprit because he placed the phone call. Clearly, the cops aren’t going to be much help in solving the crime, but their questions shift the narrative back to earlier in the day, before the murder.
The group of folks at the house owned by Sohrab and his wife Isha (Koel Purie) are old friends and relatives, including Sohrab’s father (M. K. Raina) and younger brother Arun (Chandrachoor Rai). There are a couple of outsiders, including Jayanti & Raman’s friend Chandra (Rajat Kapoor), a psychologist.
Our first clue that Sohrab might not be as beloved as the title suggests is the way he treats Chandra upon meeting him and learning his profession. As the group eats lunch on the vacation house lawn, Sohrab ridicules Chandra for being a psychologist, while simultaneously bullying Jayanti’s timid brother-in-law Sandeep (Sharat Katariya) for noting that the food was under-salted. Sohrab dumps salt into Sandeep’s food and forces him to eat it while lobbing attacks at Chandra and making everyone else uncomfortable.
Sohrab seems particularly bothered by men in more intellectual, unmasculine careers, as he later attacks Madhavan (Ranvir Shorey) for being a professor. Sohrab owns an unspecified business with Raman and only respects men who “make” things. He has further insults for his father and other women there. The only one who seems to escape Sohrab’s bullying is the house’s caretaker, Satya (Mahesh Sharma).
None of this is necessarily grounds for murder, though it’s hard to imagine many of the guests being truly upset that Sohrab is dead. Raman is secretly planning to ask Sohrab to sell his stake in their company — with a couple of potential buyers being among the guests — but again, that’s not really a matter of life or death.
Like many whodunits, the murderer’s reveal is kind of a letdown after an entertaining journey. Then again, the killer’s identity is perhaps less important than the relationships between characters and what led up to the crime. The characters are interesting and distinct, and their conversations carry this dialogue-heavy film. It’s particularly engaging for subtitle readers like me, as there are few breaks in the chatter (hence no opportunities to look down at one’s phone and get distracted).
Kapoor stages the film like a play, confining the activity to the house. Characters spend much of their time clustered together in the living room, with a few folks puttering in the background in the adjoining dining room. One scene finds five or six characters gossiping in the small kitchen, and the scene feels convivial, not cramped.
Where things go a bit awry is that Kapoor — and thus the film — seems to have much more sympathy for Sohrab than the character warrants. Pathak performs the man as cruel, yet Kapoor as Chandra judges him to be misunderstood. “I’m not sure he’s a bully. I mean, he pretends to be,” Chandra says of Sohrab, saying he sees him a vulnerable.
Is it even possible to pretend to be a bully without actually being a bully? The hurt feelings Sohrab causes are real. Trying to explain away Sohrab’s behavior by saying he really just hates himself doesn’t undo the damage he causes.
Instead of Everybody Loves Sohrab Handa being about an unsympathetic victim who actually deserves our sympathy, I think the film is about not realizing when old friendships have run their course. If the other characters in the movie are guilty of anything, it’s of not having the courage to be the first to walk away from someone they no longer like or respect.
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