CAST: Abhay Deol, Gul Panag, Vinay Pathak, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Raima Sen, Sarika

DIRECTOR: Navdeep Singh

Lakhot, a sleepy desert outpost that time has forgotten, the surface of its small-town ordinariness marred by deceipt, death, and oozing corruption. And an ordinary man, living out an ordinary life, pitchforked into the murky goings-on, who uncovers the layers, and redeems himself, in the process.

Manorama, Six Feet Under, former ad-man Navdeep Singh's remarkably atmospheric first feature is that rare Bollywood creature: it’s unabashedly noir in the way it's styled, with a superb sense of place and character. And it tells a crackling good yarn, while at it.

Suspended PWD engineer Satyaveer (Abhay) is called to his door in the middle of the night by a mysterious woman (Sarika) who wants him to shadow her husband, the area’s powerful MLA. Everyman hero SV, who’s also a failed writer of detective fiction, takes her money, and sets out to the palace with his cheap camera to catch P P Rathore (Kulbhushan) in some red-hot action.

What he gets, instead, is a troubled young woman, her face half-covered with a dupatta, an altercation, and a ghostly old woman in a wheelchair. The deed is done, and SV gets back to his life — riding the empty, dusty roads, sniping at unhappy wife Nimmi (Gul), and cribbing to brother-in-law Brij Mohan, a canny cop at the local thana (Vinay Pathak). And then the late night caller dies a brutal death. Suddenly, nothing is as it seems. Manorama, was that even her real name? How did she die? What was in the missing camera roll? What is going on in Lakhot?

... contd.