Merry Christmas

Christmas night, Mumbai. Albert comes back to the city after years; his mother has died and he is alone in the house. He goes out. Outside a cinema he meets Maria, who has her small daughter with her. They begin talking and walk about together through the night. Then Maria invites him to her home. When they go in there is something there: a body in the living room. Her husband is dead. From then on each has to decide what to tell the other, and the rest of the night is built on that decision. Sriram Raghavan directs. Katrina Kaif and Vijay Sethupathi are in the cast. The source is a novel by Frédéric Dard; the French writer's text had been adapted for cinema before. The film was shot in two languages at once: the Hindi and Tamil versions were made separately with different supporting casts. Raghavan is one of the few directors working in the thriller in Indian cinema and his films rest on classical crime plots. The pace is deliberately slow; the first half consists almost entirely of two people talking. The visual choice is a period air; the narrative does not state its year and builds a look close to the eighties. Its limit is the second half; as the explanations arrive the tension falls and the ending is too tidy. Who it is for: viewers who like classical thriller plots and slowly built narratives. Who it is not for: the pace is very slow, little happens, and the solution lands where expected.