Rautu Ka Raaz review: A refreshing attempt at a murder mystery that otherwise suffers from severe dullness!

Nawazuddin Siddique’s murder mystery is too slow paced and underdeveloped to be taken seriously despite its underlying message! 

In the long list of crime thrillers and murder mysteries releasing every other week on OTT, here's another one that didn't quite cut it. Despite being a brave attempt at being true to the ground realities of a murder investigation, Rautu Ka Raaz's half-cooked plot and dissapointing end just makes for a rather basic watch.

At a sleepy hill station called Rautu (a real place in Uttarakhand), an insomniac police officer, Deeapk Negi (Nawazuddin Siddique), troubled by his past traumas and his lazy team, gets a wake up call as Sangeeta (Narayani Shastri), the warden of the blind-school Sewadham, is suspiciously found dead one morning. After a decade of silence, this sudden death pushes the police to get back to work and investigate whether it's a natural death or a murder. It's time for evidence to be found, witnesses to be questioned, a board with photographs connected by string to be mounted, and a murder to be solved by revealing the secret killer. 

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Anand Surapar's film follows the same cliche humdrum of an investigative drama that we often get to see - corrupt politicians, greedy businessmen, sexually abusive men, conspiracies and lies mislead to hide the truth. But what's different here is the refreshing attempt at trying to normalize rather than sensationalise police work. This provides the chance to marry a murder mystery with comedy where the camaraderie amongst the police officers and their 'monotonous investigation with many follow-ups' feels interesting. Also, the observatory tone of the film that captures the rthyms of the rural life on the hills is done well.

This is the only saving grace of this otherwise dull film though which, with its glacial pace, boring suspects, and incoherent and cliche motive, left me grossly unconvinced. It's like I can see the murder mystery but it has such a random plot with flimsy backstories, abrupt twists, and closures that I was left wondering what was really happening here by the end! Nawazuddin Siddique and Rajesh Kumar, with the rest of the cast, bring in a different outlook on police officers usually seen in Bollywood films but it isn't enough. 

Without giving you any spoilers, the film is about how certain killers are made out of their circumstances and some mysteries end up changing your entire life. It's all about the perspective with which we choose to look at things! Hence the metaphor of insomniac police officer in a cold sleepy hillside and blind kids having the sight of right vs wrong makes for an interesting concept. But only on paper as it hardly translates onscreen. And I am all for OTT's obsession with investigative crime thrillers barring that they keep me engaged which this one just doesn't!  

Rautu Ka Raaz is currently streaming on Zee5! 

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