Small town locale. Bereaved cop. Drugs. Murder. Hansal Mehta’s theatrical release The Buckingham Murders has all the elements of a British crime drama that would have worked better as a limited series than a film under two hours.
After cop Jasmeet Bhamra aka Jass (Kareena Kapoor Khan) loses her son to a shooting, she takes a transfer to a small town in Buckinghamshire, the UK. She is immediately assigned to a missing child case under detective inspector Hardik Patel aka Hardy (Ash Tandon), despite her request to let her sit out the case.
The incident is set amidst rising tensions between the Sikh and the Muslim communities that ignited over a cricket match in Leicester. But below the communal tension are personal grievances between various families. The boy is found dead in a nearby park, placed in the car of a Muslim guy and implicates his nephew Saquib (Kapil Redekar). Saquib is the son of the business partner of the parents of the dead kid, Daljeet (Ranveer Brar) and Preeti (Prabhleen Sandhu) Sethi.
Despite the case bringing back the trauma of losing her child, Jass, who loads up on prescription pills to keep going, starts finding loopholes in what appears to be an open and shut case involving drugs. Everyone from the father, who is having an affair, to the neighbours, family friends and more come under suspicion.
Having grown up on a steady diet of British small-town crime shows from Midsomer Murders to Broadchurch, The Buckingham Murders feels like familiar ground with a similarly taut storyline and grey characters. The twists and turns are well plotted but the characterisation suffers because of the limited time.
Only Kareena’s Jass feels like a fully fleshed-out character and she definitely draws the audience in. DI Hardy also gets a bit of a background but it would have been interesting to see more of how his mind works. The audience hardly gets any time to either root for or hate, or form their own theories about any of the characters other than Jass. And that feels like a disservice. The other thing that interferes with the experience of the film is the background music, which instead of building tension or creating atmosphere ends up drowning out dialogues and background chatter. It is unnecessarily loud.
Kareena does a wonderful job of playing a bereaved mother struggling to maintain professionalism. Sans make-up, with a severe ponytail and practical clothes, she has nothing to distract from her performance, which is the fulcrum of the film. Her scene with the real culprit particularly stands out for her restrained rage and disbelief. Ash Tandon is also good as the gruff senior who doesn’t take kindly to a female DS questioning him or his methods. Ranvir Brar fits the bill of an aggressive, patriarchal male but feels very one-dimensional and that boils down to lack of time. The same is true for all the other characters.
The Buckingham Murders brings up relevant issues like teenage drug abuse, communal tensions, domestic violence and the close-mindedness to queer relationships but the movie-length runtime feels like a letdown. Think Mare of Easttown or Broadchurch and you feel like this was a potential left unexplored.
