Monica, O My Darling review - a visually compelling story filled with blackmail

3.5

Summary

There’s so much flare in Bala’s style along with the cinematography by Swapnil S. Sonawane. There are also some conventions pulled from a Western that works within the context of Bollywood films.

This review of the Netflix film Monica, O My Darling does not contain spoilers.

The new Netflix film Monica, O My Darling is about a young man who is desperately trying to make it big with some unlikely allies and a dastardly diabolical plan to pull off the perfect murder. From the opening of this film, the tone is set by director Vasan Bala who pulls you into the world of Satyanarayan Adhikari (Vijay Kenkre) who is the head of the Unicorn group, based in Pune. He is incredibly intelligent and has created a high-tech robot, with the help of Jayant Arkhedkar (Rajkummar Rao).

Satyanarayan is very proud of his work and ends up promoting him much to the annoyance of his son, Nishikant Adhikari (Sikandar Kher). Satyanarayan also has a daughter named Nikki (Akansha Ranjan Kapoor) who is in love with Jayant. In this web of romance and relationships, one man gets entangled in a conspiracy. The one thing Bala does well is create a unique atmosphere when blending genres. There is plenty of action and great close-ups of characters that make them intimidating when they’re speaking. There are also some conventions pulled from a Western that works within the context of Bollywood films. The suspense is built extremely well and the score that accompanies the scenes elevates it to another level. We also find out that Jayant doesn’t love Nikki but is dating her so that he can marry her and usurp the Unicorn empire. Then enters Monica Machado (Huma S Quereshi) who works in Unicorn and Jayant is attracted to her. They eventually have a fling and as months go by, Monica informs Jayant that she is pregnant with his child.

There is a string of blackmailing that happens between the characters which makes this interesting and a bit scary to watch for women. Monica wants to cut a deal with Jayant so that he pays for the maintenance of the child and for her. He is still having trouble understanding how this happened and doesn’t want it to get out, but he agrees to do it. Of course, someone did see that he had the affair with her and Nishikant wrote an anonymous letter to him telling him to meet him at the hotel later. Nishikant is then accompanied by Arvind Manivannan (Bagavathi Perumal) from the accounts department. They clear the air with who is blackmailing who and then conspire against Monica so no one finds out she’s with child. Jayant still wants to be the head of Unicorn so they plan to kill Monica. It comes down to how the business world works and trying to keep everything under wraps especially when it concerns a woman and an illegitimate child.

The story is a bit dark because they want to kill Monica, but it’s so engaging at the same time. The way they executed the blackmailing and how they decide to kill her all forms a strong film with a compelling story. It’s filled with suspense and it’s paced extremely well for the 2-hour and 10-minute runtime. There’s so much flare in Bala’s style along with the cinematography by Swapnil S. Sonawane. The visual style would often pick up the story even if there was a bit of a lull.

What did you think of Monica, O My Darling? Comment below.