Raat Akeli Hai on Netflix, with Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Radhika Apte: A classy murder mystery that works well despite some stumbles

 

 This is the season of casting directors turned film directors. After Mukesh Chhabra’s Dil Bechara, we get Honey Trehan’s Raat Akeli Hai. The title took me back to two songs. The first, of course, is the shimmery number from Vijay Anand’s Jewel Thief, which opens with these exact words. But there, the woman had agency. She was the seductress. But this is a very different world. The women are victims. The second song — inveterate eighties’ creature that I am — is Air Supply’s Lonely is the night. (In Hindi, that would translate to… Raat Akeli Hai.) The lyrics go: “Now you’re not here and now I know / Lonely is the night when I’m not with you”. The sentiment could have been written for the magnificent Ila Arun. The character she plays wants  her son — a cop named Jatil Yadav (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) — to get married soon. At first, we think she’s just a typically pushy desi mother. But later we see how alone she is after her husband died. Jatil is rarely at home, and even when he is, they bicker more than they talk. Like every other woman in Raat Akeli Hai, there’s a small sadness inside her.