Monica, O My Darling

Cups of tea have never been as portentous as they are in a sequence that plays out about an hour into in Monica, O My Darling. The eponymous character – a CEO’s secretary – makes the chai for her boss and the company’s chief tech developer. The latter baulks. He fears a deadly slip between the cup and the lip.

Director Vasan Bala and screenwriter Yogesh Chandekar inform this stray moment with a delicious mix of wit, wickedness and whimsicality that defines the neo-noir comic thriller as a whole. Full of knowing winks thrown the audience’s way, Netflix’s Monica, O My Darling, is a wildly entertaining film packed with twists and turns that keep on giving until the final fadeout.

It is delightfully tricksy, transfixing concoction that probes the goings-on in a Pune-based company, a veritable viper’s pit where nothing is what it seems. The film taps the nuts and bolts of the genre and other necessary tools to produce a movie experience that, sometimes playfully and sometimes with a sudden grab at the scruff of the neck, pushes the audience into the innards of a moral black hole where people caught in a bind continually draw upon their wiles but find no way out.

Behind the manipulations and manic measures that the warped minds resort to, a privileged lot battle it out with the not-so-privileged who not only seek their pound of flesh but also figure out ways to get it.