One of the pitfalls of working primarily as entertainment to either the great unwashed masses or the cud-chewing family archetype is that Indian cinema has either completely omitted or produced extremely crude and elementary examples of films in off-kilter genres like horror and noir. The detective noir in particular has been rarely seen in home-grown film efforts. One suspects that the basic tenets of this type of film run in direct contrast to the basic tenets of mainstream 'masala' movie-dom. In noir, the central protagonist (hero, if he may be called that) is almost typically a deadbeat; a loser who nurses a dream of making it good in life and has compromised himself (or herself but let me concentrate on one gender for convenience sake) in some ways to get along with the world, but still lives on the fringes, by compulsion more than choice. Against this background he finds himself getting rapidly embroiled in an unfolding roller-coaster of characters and circumstances that often turn out to be other than what they initially appear. He finds himself in situations where his internal code of conduct - what may be his sleeping but not quite dead conscience - is called in to make the decisions...and the results are never entirely happy.

One of the previous efforts in Hindi films that could be said to have a brush with the noir genre is Ketan Mehta's 1997 outing Aar Ya Paar. That one suffered from two fatal flaws – incredibly bad casting and most abysmal direction. Thankfully, Navdeep Singh's debut feature crosses those hurdles with a nimble grace and has enough points of interest to merit viewing.

The protagonist Satyaveer aka SV (Abhay Deol) is archetype noir, right down to the irony of his name. He is the failed author of a detective novel Manorama, which according to his words was the “magnum opus that sold less than 200 copies”. Running his domestic affairs - which include affectionate, if not always sweet-tongued wife Nimmi (Gul Panag) and son - with a government job, SV bungles even this and at the start of the narrative, has received a suspension order for taking bribes. In the midst of this mundane not-quite-happy situation SV receives a visit from a strange woman (Sarika), supposedly the wife of a local MLA, who wants him to play private eye and investigate her husband for extra-marital shenanigans. SV is game for what seems a well-paying errand and comes up with some material...only to find that his client was not the MLA's wife, but a woman called Manorama and worse...this Manorama turns up dead in what is claimed to be an accident. A dazed SV starts to poke about the mystery and finds himself coming across a motley of characters, who...let it suffice to say initial impressions are not always the correct ones. Whether SV manages to reach the truth of the mysterious threads enmeshing him and whether he is able to come through his experience unscathed is what forms the rest of the narrative.