The Buckingham Murders: Kareena Kapoor nails the role

NEW DELHI: In The Buckingham Murders, an English-Hindi thriller centred on motherhood, mourning and murder, Kareena Kapoor leaps miles away geographically and in terms of character dynamic to portray a policewoman investigating the death of a British-Indian schoolboy even as the grief of losing her only child gnaws her soul.

Once again, there is nary a flaw in Kareena Kapoor’s performance. She nails the role with admirable felicity. She lends the Hansal Mehta-directed crime drama a compact and deeply affecting core with sustained, coiled-up intensity, according to a review by the NDTV.

The firm-footed film, written by Aseem Arrora, Kashyap Kapoor and Raghav Raj Kakker, probes the ‘who’ and ‘why’ much more than it does the ‘how’ and ‘what’ and keeps the audience on its toes. It isn’t the sort of thriller that combusts and explodes.

The Buckingham Murders simmers and crackles instead. It lets off steam occasionally but without ever aiming for the kind of superficial payoffs that are normally associated with genre films that adhere to the rules.

The Buckingham Murders centres on a mother and a police sleuth caught between the lingering, all-engulfing shadow of a personal tragedy and a headlong plunge into a professional assignment that threatens to exacerbate her fragile psyche.

This is Hansal Mehta’s first murder mystery. Working within the limits of the genre, the Shahid and Aligarh director falls back to a great extent on the delicate sensibility that defines his cinema. He creates a larger social, emotional, and even historical, context for the police procedural to elevate it above the ordinary.

Above all else, The Buckingham Murders explores the meaning of motherhood and not only through the eyes of the protagonist. It does not, however, in any way seek to define a woman merely in terms of the gender roles that society apportions to her.

The Voice 2024: Season 26 launch and new features

The fault lines out here are numerous. Peddling of drugs, the suppression of sexual preferences, clandestine extramarital affairs and obsessions, and rising distrust among the people queer the pitch for the police.

There is, at every turn, more to The Buckingham Murders than you would find in an average tale of crime. Watch it for the depth that Hansal Mehta imparts to a genre film, the sparkling star turn that Kareena Kapoor Khan delivers and the clutch of competent supporting actors – notably Ranveer Brar as a bereaved father, Ash Tandon as a crusty detective, Kapil Redekar as a youth charged with murder and Keith Allen as a seasoned police official days away from superannuation.

All in all, The Buckingham Murders makes the most of its resources and then some.