‘The Buckingham Murders’ review: More TV procedural than detective film

As I stepped out of The Buckingham Murders into a fittingly English drizzle, I wondered why this film was in theatres. Not that it’s terrible—there’s a dour competency from start to finish. It’s just that nothing in Hansal Mehta’s film seems like it’s done with a cinema audience in mind. It’s the most TV-coded film imaginable.

The lines were always going to blur. Over the last few years, pretty much every talented Hindi director has taken a crack at show running or episode direction. Mehta has been particularly successful; Scam 1992 is up there with Shahid as his best ever work. Yet, as much as Hindi shows have become ‘cinematic’, the language and aesthetic of episodic storytelling has started bleeding into our films.    

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Jasmeet Bhamra (Kareena Kapoor Khan) is a detective sergeant newly arrived in the town of Buckinghamshire. She’s immediately put to work by the superintendent (Keith Allen), who’s weirdly unsympathetic about her recently losing her young son in a restaurant shooting. A Sikh boy, Ishpreet, has gone missing. His parents, Daljeet (Ranveer Brar) and Preeti (Prabhleen Sandhu), are in a visibly strained marriage. There’s a possibility Ishpreet was mixed up in drugs; one of his father’s friends used to be a dealer. The police also suspect combative Saquib (Kapil Redekar), whose father split bitterly from his business venture with Daljeet.    

I haven’t watched Mare of Easttown, the 2021 miniseries in which Kate Winslet plays a troubled detective; Khan told Variety she’s a fan of the show and they “molded a little bit on those lines”. But The Buckingham Murders feels palpably like a season of a British procedural whittled down to under two hours. The writing is flinty and functional, the kind you’d get on a run-of-the-mill crime show (“I should write you up for insubordination”; “In our day we used to get on with the job”). There’s too much going on—all the affairs and animosities and traumas need five or six episodes to work themselves out and gain some resonance. There’s also one key performance that suffers greatly, a shift in tone that arrives too late and thus feels like a con. 

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The Buckingham Murders is a rare Hindi film set entirely in a foreign country. But Mehta and the writers (Aseem Arrora, Raghav Raj Kakker, Kashyap Kapoor) make disappointingly little of this opportunity. I was intrigued by the dour detective inspector Hardy (Ash Tandon)—a British Indian who doesn’t speak Hindi and shows no attachment to the community—but the film takes the character in sensational, rather than revelatory, directions. There are simmering tension between the Muslim and Sikh communities, and a nicely directed flare-up in front of a gurdwara. But there’s scant insight into the south Asian community in this corner of Britain—their food, music, quirks, concerns. It feels like the work of people who came down for a few months, did the best they could, and left without any deep impression of the place.  

Khan offers a convincing, if unadventurous, portrait in extreme grief. There’s a moving scene with Jasmeet and her father in the park, where he expresses concern, is scolded, but persists and is rewarded by his daughter briefly relaxing and smiling. I was less convinced by the more cliched depictions of acting out: Jasmeet cussing, lashing out psychically, going sad-clubbing. After one of these eruptions gets her demoted to the desk, she walks out of the station and lets out a wordless scream. It’s the sort of moment that should fill the screen, the hall. But the scream is weak and the treatment almost apologetic. The few people in the theatre with me laughed. There could not be a better illustration of a movie moment failing because it’s treated like TV.

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