Blackmail

Dev works at a toilet paper company. His marriage is bad; he and his wife barely speak. One day he leaves work early, goes home and finds her with someone else. He does not go in. He tells nobody. Instead he makes a plan: he will send the lover an anonymous blackmail letter. The man pays. Dev makes money. But to find the money the man steals from his own wife, and she notices something. The chain lengthens and four or five people start blackmailing one another. Abhinay Deo directs. Irrfan Khan plays Dev; Kirti Kulhari, Arunoday Singh and Divya Dutta are in the cast. The language is Hindi. Its form is black comedy; the events proceed logically and each step is worse than the last. The narrative gives no character sympathy; everyone does the same thing at some point. Irrfan Khan's performance is built largely in silence; the character's interior voice is used as narration. The film satirises office life; advertising slogans and corporate language are its material. The narrative shows violence as a comic accident, and that register strikes some viewers as uncomfortable. The film did not take the expected result at the box office and interest in it grew later. Its limit is structure; the plot rests on coincidence and the last section runs long. Who it is for: viewers who like Indian black comedy and Irrfan Khan. Who it is not for: the characters are repellent, the register cold, and the ending strained.