Badla Movie Review

Film – Badla
Cast – Amitabh Bachchan, Taapsee Pannu
Director – Sujoy Ghosh

The award-winning team of Pink, Amitabh Bachchan, and Taapsee Pannu reunite on the big screen for the mystery thriller, Badla.

The film is directed by Sujoy Ghosh, it is an official remake of Spanish film The Invisible Guest and is produced by Shah Rukh Khan under his production house Red Chillies Entertainment. The film also features Amrita Singh.

Badla is a suspense-thriller-murder mystery; an ultra-successful businesswoman, Naina Sethi (Taapsee Pannu) is married with a daughter and lives in London. Things turn sour for her when she is accused of murdering her lover, Arjun Joseph (Tony Luke).

Needless to say that all the evidences are against Naina since she was the only one in the hotel room where Arjun was killed, though she claims her innocence stating there was a third person in the room, who has committed the murder and tried to frame her. Unfortunately, the crime scene investigations revealed that the room was locked from inside. Witnesses outside the room confirmed that nobody came out of the room.

Naina's lawyer Jimmy Punjabi (Manav Kaul) realises that it’s a tricky situation. Hence he hires expert defence attorney Badal Gupta (Amitabh Bachchan) to ensure she doesn’t have to go to jail.

Badal conducts his own investigation and grills Naina for clues and truth, which opens a whole new can of worms. She reveals that the murder of Arjun has something to do with the disappearance of a young man from a small town of Aviemore named Sunny Kaur. What happens next forms the rest of the film.

Sujoy Ghosh's adapted screenplay tries it’s best to do justice to the original film and its plot. A lot of scenes are well written. However the film is complicated in the middle. Moreover, the film has narrative from character’s point of view, so it is gripping and explanatory. The dialogues are sharp and witty.

Unlike Pink, this one is cold, intense and shocking to the core.

The mystery thrillers are always difficult to pull off and it looks like filmmaker Sujoy Ghosh has so far pulled it off quite perfectly.