Jaane Jaan keeps Higashino’s perfect-crime trick intact and wins on Jaideep Ahlawat’s quiet menace

Sujoy Ghosh’s Jaane Jaan (the title means “Beloved”, and the film was released internationally as Suspect X) is a murder story in which we know who did it almost from the start. The question is who will be made to pay. That is the engine of Keigo Higashino’s 2005 novel The Devotion of Suspect X, which was filmed in South Korea in 2012 as Perfect Number. Ghosh moves it to Kalimpong, in northern West Bengal, and keeps the central trick intact. It reached Netflix on 21 September 2023.

Maya D’Souza (Kareena Kapoor Khan) is a single mother who runs a cafeteria. Her teenage daughter Tara (Naisha Khanna) lives with her. Next door lives Naren Vyas (Jaideep Ahlawat), a reclusive mathematics teacher, solemn and introverted, though well liked by his students. He buys his lunch from Maya’s cafeteria, and their short morning exchanges are the brightest part of his day. The film takes its time showing this. Then Ajit (Saurabh Sachdeva), Maya’s abusive estranged husband and a corrupt policeman, turns up one night to extort the money she took when she fled him fourteen years earlier. He threatens both women, the situation turns violent, and Ajit is strangled, partly in self-defence. Naren overhears the commotion, understands what has happened and offers his help. He disposes of the body and plans the cover-up step by step.

Ahlawat carries the film. Naren never asks for sympathy and Ahlawat never plays for it. What shows his feeling for Maya is the work: the plan, the body, and later the confession. He seems to be thinking two moves ahead of everyone around him, and the performance makes that believable without turning him into a puzzle box. The Filmfare OTT critics’ prize for Best Actor went to him, and it was deserved. Kapoor Khan has the harder job in some ways. Maya has to look like a woman with nothing to hide while hiding everything, and she lets the fear show only in small gaps. She won Best Actress in a Web Original Film at the same ceremony. Khanna has less room as Tara, but her scenes with Kapoor Khan are what give the crime its weight.

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Vijay Varma plays Inspector Karan Anand, a former classmate of Naren, sent to trace the missing Ajit. The search takes him to Kalimpong, to burned remains carrying Ajit’s credentials, and to an immediate suspicion of Maya. But Maya and Tara have a detailed alibi, and the autopsy places the death on the tenth of the month. Karan cannot find a crack in it. He is ready to go home when one of Maya’s employees mentions Naren’s crush on her, and the case turns toward the teacher. Varma plays Karan as tenacious rather than flashy, and the duel works because the two men know each other. Nobody shouts. They circle.

The turn that matters comes late, and it comes from Naren himself. He walks into the police station and confesses to Ajit’s murder, saying he acted at Maya’s behest, then presents himself as a delusional man who has been stalking her, with evidence to match. He builds his own guilt as carefully as he built the cover-up. I will not say how it resolves.

The flaws are real. The running time could be tighter, and some scenes stay a beat too long. The emotional exchanges between Maya and Naren occasionally tip into melodrama, which sits badly with the otherwise grounded tone. The dialogue also explains too much now and then, especially when the film wants us to admire Naren’s mathematical mind rather than let us see it at work.

Audiences did not seem to mind. Jaane Jaan set the record for the biggest opening weekend viewership for an Indian film on Netflix, and it topped the platform’s engagement report for Indian films in the second half of 2023, with more than 20 million views. At the 2024 Filmfare OTT Awards it received eight nominations, among them Best Web Original Film, Best Director for Ghosh and Best Supporting Actor for Varma, and it won three: Best Web Original Film (Critics), Best Actor (Critics) for Ahlawat, and Best Actress for Kapoor Khan.

Watch it for Ahlawat, and for the way the plot rests on conversations and a handful of rooms in a small town rather than on set pieces. Mostly that choice pays off.

Cast

Photos: The Movie Database (TMDB)

Tags: Netflix, thrillers, Vijay Varma, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Jaideep Ahlawat, Sujoy Ghosh

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