A dinner party that promised tension, mystery, and satire turns into a clumsy masquerade of colonial hang-ups and self-importance. Lord Curzon Ki Haveli tries to thrill but ends up exhausting, leaving curiosity unsatisfied. Arnab Banerjee’s review.

Cast: Rasika Dugal, Arjun Mathur, Paresh Pahuja, Zoha Rahman, Tanmay Dhanania

Director: Anshuman Jha

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

Reviewed by: Arnab Banerjee

Lord Curzon Ki Haveli, directed by Anshuman Jha and starring Rasika Dugal, Arjun Mathur, Paresh Pahuja, and Zoha Rahman, attempts to blend mystery, satire, and social commentary within a London mansion setting. However, despite its strong cast and ambitious tone, the film falters due to a confused script and overindulgent dialogue. Aiming for Hitchcockian suspense but achieving little more than stagey awkwardness, it becomes a commentary on missed potential. For those seeking intrigue or psychological depth, Lord Curzon Ki Haveli offers only frustration — a slow, wordy dinner party that never quite serves the main course.

There’s something innately delicious about a good mystery — the kind that tightens its grip with every scene, whispering secrets just out of earshot, inviting the viewer to lean in, connect dots, and squint into the cinematic shadows. Alas, Lord Curzon Ki Haveli is not that film. Instead, what unfolds is an overwrought chamber drama that aspires to Hitchcockian suspense but lands somewhere between amateur theatre and a particularly awkward dinner party.

Set in a curiously located haveli on the fringes of London — which, to the discerning eye, looks more like an Airbnb caught between bookings — the film opens with promise. Four Indians gather for dinner, and a joke from their host about a corpse in the house sets the tone. Or at least, it tries to. What should have triggered tension instead feels like the opening line of a party game gone wrong.

A Haveli Without Haunting

The premise is simple enough: Rohit (Arjun Mathur), a jobless software engineer and illegal immigrant, and his partner Sanya (Zoha Rahman), host a dinner for Basukinath (Paresh Pahuja), a doctor with a suspiciously acquired British accent, and his new bride Ira (Rasika Dugal), a bright-eyed, outspoken Punjabi woman plucked from the matrimonial ether by way of personal advertisement. What could have simmered with intrigue instead boils over with stilted dialogue, paper-thin characterisation, and enough awkward silences to make a mime wince.

The script, co-written by director Anshuman Jha and Bikas Ranjan Mishra, seems less concerned with suspense than with demonstrating how very clever it thinks it is. Unfortunately, cleverness without substance is a dangerous cocktail — shaken, stirred, and eventually spilled all over the plot.

Instead of gradually unravelling its secrets, the film opts for long stretches of bizarre banter, delivered with the kind of performative poise usually reserved for first-year drama school showcases. Ira, the only character with any semblance of dimension, gamely navigates this awkward terrain in a gown for all of ten seconds before slipping into an oversized shirt and, metaphorically, the role of sole audience proxy: confused, curious, and just a little bit bored.

Colonial Hangovers and Forced Wit

An unexplained box, strange noises (which could be a ghost, or simply bad sound design), and the abrupt arrival of a pizza delivery man (Tanmay Dhanania, in a role so brief one wonders if he wandered in from a different film) fail to inject much-needed adrenaline. There’s even a fleeting moment where a possible fivesome is teased, but the film quickly retreats from that cliff of intrigue back into its usual territory of colonial hangovers and socio-political monologues that feel as forced as the accents.

Speaking of which, Lord Curzon Ki Haveli delights in lampooning the post-colonial hang-ups of the Indian diaspora, but does so with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer wrapped in irony. Basuki, proud of his British job and posh pronunciation, is less a character than a caricature. His identity crisis might have made for interesting viewing, if only the film didn’t choose to spell everything out as though the audience were unlikely to keep up.

The central twist — and yes, there is one — arrives not with a gasp but a groan, revealing a clutch of self-serving cynics who confuse philosophical brooding with actual personality. Their colonial angst and casual cruelty are meant to be biting commentary; instead, they land with the weight of an undergraduate thesis in search of a plot.

When Mystery Turns to Monologue

To the credit of the actors, all immensely capable, they do what they can. Rasika Dugal brings warmth and humour to a role that could have easily slid into stereotype. Arjun Mathur and Paresh Pahuja do their best with the wooden dialogue and underdeveloped arcs. But good actors can only do so much when trapped in a film that doesn’t seem to know whether it’s a mystery, a satire, or a social critique — and ends up being none of them.

In the end, Lord Curzon Ki Haveli feels like an ambitious student film with a budget: well-intentioned, poorly executed, and sorely in need of a script doctor. It reaches for cinematic tension but lands on dinner-theatre discomfort. What should have been a tightly wound thriller collapses into a muddled, monologue-heavy meditation on identity and imperialism — one that, unfortunately, forgets to be interesting.