The cocktail of intrigue falls flat

Nonika Singh

He is ACP Ashwini Dikshit (Kay Kay Menon) and his wife Shifa (Mandira Bedi) is a poetess who writes and recites poems. Right from scene one you can sense a degree of artifice and obscurity. Together they make for a fine couple…only he dreams of her death, nay murder. And then all around him murders start to happen…leading to a hotel/nightclub by the name of Vodka Diaries. Till the interval you are caught in the maze of whodunit. Murders that happen in quick succession have a scary and sinister edge. 

Raima Sen, playing the strange woman/ seductress, utters, ‘Dar mein bhi ek nasha hai...’ and you wonder about her antecedents, ahem, where is she coming from? Is she a ghost… is she the murderer or has the ACP sahib lost his mind?

Suddenly the film takes another track; are these murders for real? Here onwards we wouldn’t divulge more for the thrill of thrillers lies in unraveling the unknown.  But the moot question is; is there enough thrill? Yes, till the murders happen you can feel a tingling chill running down your spine. The fact that the film is set in snow-clad Manali makes you shiver a tad more. Thereafter it takes a more cerebral/psychological route and the final resolution has you more amused than stunned.

Oh really...  this is how the cookie was crumbling. Indeed, some clues are there right from the beginning. Menon’s frenzied pace, his errant behaviour and few other events…on hindsight there are a few tickers if not dead giveaways. Menon does seem suitably harried and gives away enough hints of something deeper going in here. Raima Sen, seen in Bollywood after a while, looks refreshingly charming.

Never mind that her character is not so well fleshed out. Mandira Bedi too gets to flex her acting muscles intermittently in a film that has a haphazard touch of shock, surrealism and psychology.  Is it a mind game or reality? As Menon’s character says in the end, ‘Sab kuch dheere dheere samajh aata hai’. 

Sure we get it…but was such convolution required in the first place? If you are game for intricate puzzles sans logic take a swig of this vodka.  But this is no concoction that will intoxicate you.  Even at short 117 minutes, it does seem drawn out and draws out gifted actor Menon too who begins to look as weary as the laggard path the film finally takes.

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