Manorama Six Feet Under (2007)

The writing is clever, the visuals are impressive and the performances are very good. Director Navdeep Singh stays with his sub-heading 'In the desert nothing is as it seems'. So in 'Manorama 6 Feet Under' nothing is indeed as it seems. Singh smartly unfolds the mystery and springs a lot of surprises. The film is set in sandy Rajasthan which is portrayed as mysterious, dry, isolated, illusive and frightening. Thus, it's a perfect set-up for the film.
Manorama SFU is all about a somewhat corrupt junior engineer Satyaveer (Abhay Deol) who moonlights as a writer of detective fiction and lives in a small town in Rajasthan. His only published work is MANORAMA. He is 'happily' married to Nimmi (Gul Panag) and has a kid. One day he is asked by a woman called Manorama (Sarika) to investigate her husband PP Rathore, the minister of public works (KulBhushan Khrabanda). Satyaveer manages to take some photos of the minister and hand them over to Manorama. Strange events follow where she tells him she is being stalked and may be killed, tells him her age, and then dies. He is stalked and attacked by hoodlums but persists in trying to unravel the mystery with the help of Manorama's room mate Sheetal (Raima Sen). But there is a doctor, a mysterious woman who wants to marry the doctor, the novel Manorama; the minister is connected to all this and to a proposed canal scheme. The plot twists and turns in a very ingenious and real way and keeps one wanting to know more and more. This mystery may have been inspired by Chinatown but it is very much its own film, intelligent, well paced and interesting.
The cast gives commendable performances, Abhay Deol is wonderful, Gul and Raima are real and believable. Then there is Sarika - how does she look so good at her age? Vinay Pathak is great as Nimmi's brother and small town cop. The snooping neighbors, the hoodlums in the desert, the old Taxi Walla - the film does not miss a beat.
4/5