This week, we will have the release of Kahaani 2, the spiritual successor to Sujoy Ghosh’s cult hit, Kahaani. But before that, let’s look at 10 recent Bollywood mystery thrillers and how they fared at the box office.
Who doesn’t like a good suspense story that keeps you guessing till the end? A good mystery, be it books or movies, has the capability to keep you hooked and let you be a part of the crime solving. A proper whodunit is a very tricky proposition to make – you have to keep your target audience on their toes to let them puzzled about the identity of the killer till the very end. And when the final reveal is on the screen, they should be like, ‘OMG! Not him/her. I thought it was the driver, man!’ If you manage to elicit that kind of response from your viewers, bingo! You have cracked the formula of making a good suspense thriller.
As the times change, even the format of how a mystery movie is being narrated has changed. Earlier, it was all about discovering a dead body, and finding out who killed that man/woman. Some prime examples of this format are movies like Khamosh, Gumnaam, Teesra Kaun etc. Nowadays the format has changed – it’s not about catching the killer anymore; it’s more about how to find out the modus operandi of the murder. Suspense movies these days let you be invested in the investigations so much that you become a sleuth yourself. Some of them don’t even reveal who the killer is; and yet you don’t feel disappointed. After all a bad reveal can spoil the entire journey that came before.
This week, we will have the release of Kahaani 2, the spiritual successor to Sujoy Ghosh’s cult hit, Kahaani. Vidya Balan again plays the protagonist here, though she is no longer Vidya Bagchi – she is Durga Rani Singh, or is she? That’s what the investigating officer, played by Arjun Rampal and we, the audience are going to find out this Friday.
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