Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Murder Mubarak’ on Netflix, an Indian Ensemble Murder Mystery That Recalls ‘Glass Onion’

Two old genres recently reanimated come together in Murder Mubarak (now on Netflix), the murder mystery and the eat-the-rich satire. I feel like we’ve seen that marriage before, but more on that in a minute, because we have to keep nut-graffing this graf: Homi Adajania directs a large ensemble cast led by Pankaj Tripathi, Sara Ali Khan and Vijay Varma, because a small ensemble cast just wouldn’t provide the necessary levels of convolution to properly qualify the film as a murder mystery. Adapting Anuja Chauhan’s novel Club You to Death, the movie is set at an upper-crust Delhi country club full of characters steeped in enough privilege that you can’t help but laugh when they’re traumatized by a murder on the premises – or maybe not traumatized enough, because what should we expect from caricatures of extraordinarily rich people? Portraits of poignant humanity? 

MURDER MUBARAK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s Tambula Night at the Royal Delhi Club, where everyone dresses to the nines and rolls up in their Benzes to play bingo, like a bunch of a-holes. There’s a body lying behind a curtain next to an oozy red puddle that the cat keeps licking. Ew. His name is Prince Harry. The cat, I mean. And so we’re introduced to the suspects via splashy subtitles: Serially shitty tipper Rannvijay Singh (Sanjay Kapoor), ne’er-do-well druggie Yash (Suhail Nayyar) and his mother Roshni (Tisca Chopra), aging actress Shehnaz (Karisma Kapoor), goofy socialite Cookie (Dimple Kapadia) and, most notably perhaps, lawyer guy Akash Dogra (Varma) and too-young widow Bambi (Khan). Who. Dun. It? I ask. Who indeed.

Figuring that out is up to Bhavani Singh (Tripathi), the unflappable detective of the police cops who has two pairs of glasses because he’s not nearsighted or farsighted, but nonsighted, although he can actually see. I feel like there’s a better word for that. Anyway, the body and the puddle and the cat behind the curtain was a red herring that only makes this movie longer, longer than it needs to be, which is to say it’s too long. The real dead person is Leo (Ashim Gulati), found on the weight bench with the bar on his neck and his eyes bulged out, the victim of an apparent bench-press mishap. OR WAS IT. Flustery-blustery club manager Devendra (Deven Bhojani) is really invested in maintaining the supreme richness and status of the club and is therefore ripe and ready to write the death off as an oops, but Singh isn’t here to save face for a bunch of richies. No, he’s certain this was the result of foul play, and he’s going to look at security footage and interview people in a flat non-leading tone and figure out the truth. 

Thus begins about 100 effing minutes of Singh poking around, intercut with asides and flashbacks and character bits and jokes that make this movie move like a tortoise through a tar pit in a gravity-density chamber set to “obliterate.” There’s much time spent with Bambi and Akash; they have a past lined with broken hearts, and she shows pointed interest in the murder case, and, independent of Singh, begins her own little investigation. Turns out that Leo, a club employee and therefore someone who has an average annual salary of doodledy-squat, was blackmailing, oh, pretty much every member, since you can’t be that rich without having skeletons you’d rather keep buried in the back of one of your half-dozen walk-in humidors. Will Singh get to the bottom of all this? More to the point, will we give a damn?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Yes, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery worked the same premise, but with more wit and clarity.

Performance Worth Watching: Tripathi is terrific in a subtly comic role – the nuance in his smugly bemused facial expressions tells an entire story of class warfare – but Sara Ali Khan brings the most dynamic charisma to a film that’s otherwise populated with goofy types instead of legit characters.

Memorable Dialogue: Akash flatters our detective just a little bit:

Akash: By the way, a poet and a detective are two sides of the same coin.

Singh: Absolutely! One unravels riddles, and the other solves them.

Sex and Skin: One PG-13-flavored scene that’s nothing to get too steamed up about.

Our Take: Murder Mubarak is a major all-over-the-placer that veers from broad comedy to touching character moments to hyperventilating melodrama to meta-commentary to social critique with the occasional instance of brutal, gory violence. I imagine the conglomeration of footage Adajania handed to the film editor being a nightmare, considering the lumpy and unwieldy final product. And it begs for further condensing, as some scenes are unnecessarily drawn-out, or simply extraneous; tonally, its sillier comic moments clash so mightily with its depictions of death, it feels tasteless.

The film has its moments – Varma’s hangdog sincerity and Khan’s empathies for an aging, dementia-stricken club staffer give us an occasional emotional foothold – but it can’t overcome its tonal inconsistencies and narrative bloat. Even the final reveal is a slog, stretching to nearly 30 minutes and testing our by-then already taxed patience. You have to admire the film’s ambition to a degree, its desire to throw us into an intricately tangled web and compel us to watch it unravel, satirizing the haves-vs.-have-nots dynamic. But sticking with it feels less fun and more like being handcuffed to a bench while characters talk and talk and the narrative jumps from character to character, most of whom lack dimension. The only truly likable person here is Singh, and he’s a blank slate, a conduit for the plot (although I guess further exploring him might compromise his objective perspective; I’ll at least make that excuse on the movie’s behalf). Bottom line, it’s just too much work for a vaguely unsatisfying payoff.

Our Call: Glass Onion did it far better – watch that instead. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.