We live in times when every Friday, the relevance of a film diminishes thanks to a flurry of newer releases. But Netflix’s Monica, O My Darling has all the markings of an evergreen cult classic that will long outlast the content fighting it out for weekly transience. The Vasan Bala directorial is not just a murder mystery but a love letter to cinema itself. It is full of homages to the best of Hollywood and Bollywood – from Quentin Tarantino to Vishal Bhardwaj, Vasan Bala gives a nod to the greats from all over.
The neo-noir comedy, replete with a nostalgic ’70s-style soundtrack, is highly entertaining in addition to being a cinema nerd’s dream. You should definitely grab a bucket of popcorn before watching Monica, O My Darling, the spiritually robust successor to Bala’s Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota (The Man Who Feels No Pain), a tribute to campy martial arts films from the 1970s/80s.
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Every Character Is Cast Perfectly
A “perfect” murder plan is hatched by three men – Jay (Rajkummar Rao), Nishi (Sikandar Kher), and Arvind (Bagavathi Perumal) – who are being blackmailed by Monica (Huma Qureshi). But all hell breaks loose when the wrong person dies, followed by a series of other mysterious deaths.
ACP (Assistant Commissioner of Police) Vijayashanti Naidu (Radhika Apte) enters this game of snake and ladders making the whodunnit every bit more riveting. You see, ACP Naidu is not your regular cop; she’s a cool cop. On Mondays, she believes everyone tells the truth; this is something the eccentric cop reveals while playing carrom and interrogating a suspect. At first, you think there is a method to her madness, but maybe there is something more mundanely sinister going on with her. Radhika Apte has played one too many serious cop characters, but here she brings an unsettlingly jolly conviction to her character that helps her stand out once again.
Kher’s Nishi is menacingly incompetent, and Perumal’s Arvind plays the ‘nervous wreck’ trope with perfection. Shiva Rindani is cast as Tamang Rana, and his very casting in itself is a classic ode to the good ol’ ’80s/’90s Bollywood when Rindani played kitschy baddies like Captain Zaatack.
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Rajkummar Rao, who has had one outstanding performance after another throughout his decade-long career, gives yet another layered performance as the delusional and disillusioned protagonist. His perfume of choice is Notorious Noir Extreme (another inside joke on the genre), but he is neither as notorious nor cutthroat as he believes. The very way his character is crafted is simultaneously an homage to and a commentary on all the crime thriller protagonists who have come before him. He is an outsider who got in. He is the hero with a rags-to-riches story, with a backstory that is often used to sell a thousand dreams. But he is also constantly reminded that he will never stop being an imposter who can’t lay claim to the same mistakes that his patrons (those born into generational wealth) can.
The Pop Culture References
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If you are also someone who goes gaga over shows and movies with dollops of pop culture references (all Community fans say ‘aye!’), then this one’s made for you!
The film’s screenplay is loosely adapted from the 1989 Japanese novel Burutasu No Shinzou (Heart of Brutus). The name of the film is an homage to the 1971 Hindi thriller Caravan, which featured the iconic song “Piya Tu Ab To Aaja” with the now-famous line “Monica, O My Darling.” This line also referred to the woman the baddie in Caravan was having an affair with, much like it is in Monica, O My Darling. But there is more sympathy for the vampy seductress in Bala’s narrative because he recognises that the main villain is power hierarchies, not the ones trying to play and win at a rigged game. The references do not end there; they begin.
In one scene, Monica stands in front of a cafe called Bates Motel, an obvious reference to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. But here’s what makes this more than just a random Easter egg.
Spoilers ahead In Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel of the same name, Norman Bates murders his mother by poisoning her with strychnine. In Monica, O My Darling, the eponymous Monica accidentally ingests snake venom. Here’s where the foreshadowing (or perhaps random tangential red herring) intensifies: up till the point antivenoms were discovered, all sorts of opposing-action treatments were prescribed for snake bites, including intravenous injections of various kinds of poisons. In the 1890s, the notorious poison of choice was none other than strychnine. Spoilers over
…And There are More References
In one scene, we see Jay chewing up a piece of paper with incriminating evidence on it, in an ode to Shah Rukh Khan’s famous scene from the 1993 romantic thriller Baazigar. Of course, the ‘eat the evidence’ trope is not really uncommon in crime fiction. The dark hilarity of Monica, O My Darling is that there is pigeon poop smeared on the piece of paper Rao’s Jay chomps down on, making one wonder why he didn’t just burn it.
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In a dream sequence reminiscent of Tarantino’s Kill Bill scene featuring O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) and the Bride (Uma Thurman), Huma Qureshi’s Monica swings gracefully through the air with a chef’s cleaver in hand, slicing Nishi’s throat.
Monica, Jay, Nishi, and Arvind all work for a company called ‘Unicorn,’ an organisation featured in the cult manga and tokusatsu series called Giant Robo, aka Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot by Mitsuteru Yokoyama. At one point, Jay is also spotted in a T-shirt with a Giant Robo. Jay, the star engineer at Unicorn, also builds a robotic arm that resembles the tentacles of Doctor Octopus, Spider-Man’s arch-nemesis.
In another scene, Jay’s fiance Nikki (Akansha Ranjan Kapoor) tells him over a call, “I was f**king flying like Back to the Future,” while sitting in a car similar in appearance to the new DeLorean Alpha5. Nikki also keeps talking about a certain cousin and referring to her as “My Cousin Vinny,” an ode to the Joe Pesci-Maria Tomei classic. The indicative tagline for the Jonathan Lynn comic caper – “There have been many courtroom dramas that have glorified The Great American Legal System. This is not one of them.” – is yet another clue hiding in plain sight.
Outside the BD Inamdar Staff Quarters, where Jay lives, there is a chalkboard with the names of several filmmakers and their characters, seeming residents of the place. There is also a little note on it that reads, “Thank you for pausing to read the names.” And the names include Singeetam Srinivasa Rao, Sriram Raghavan, Vishal Bhardwaj, Sai Paranjpee, Pankaj Advani, Abbas Mastan, P.T. (Paul Thomas) Anderson, Anurag Kashyap, Vijay Anand, Guru D (Dutt), Q. Tino (Quentin Tarantino) along with a certain Sarika Vartak, who is not a filmmaker but a character played by Urmila Matondkar in Sriram Raghavan’s debut neo-noir thriller Ek Haseena Thi.
Vasan Bala doesn’t just reference other filmmakers and their work. He also sticks the landing by going meta. He brings back his lead characters from Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota – played by Radhika Madan (who was also in Bala’s Ray anthology short) and Abhimanyu Dassani – thus bringing things full circle.
