Kay Kay Menon trips, so do we

VODKA DIARIES Direction: Kushal Srivastava Actors:Kay Kay Menon, Mandira Bedi Rating:

Vodka Diaries is more psychological thriller than murder mystery. A hotel in Manali is suddenly in the news after five murders occur there in a few days. A cop named Ashwini Dixit (Kay Kay Menon) is investigating, but his operation comes to a halt when his wife goes missing.

He turns out to be the story within the story. This cop drinks a lot and slurs. He’s a kind of anti-hero; a vulnerable, emotional man trying to seem tough. You can never quite tell what his motives are. You can’t help but wonder if someone’s manipulating him. His wife Shikha (Mandira Bedi) and assistant Ankit (Sharib Hashmi) seem to be his only friends. Debutant director Kushal Srivastava opens the film on a promising note. This cop and his rather circumscribed life are quiet but intriguing.

There’s some smart filmmaking technique on display too, as when the story travels from past to present in continuous shots. After the first 40 minutes, though, you’ve just about had it with this pace-of-life stagnancy.

You wait for something to happen. Instead, what you get is stretched and repetitive. The only thing that occasionally jolts you out of the slumber is the background score, and not in a good way.

Kay Kay tries to substitute plot with intensity, but he just doesn’t have enough to work with. Srivastava is promising and brave. His first film already feels, technically and in terms of character arc, like the work of someone who’s done this before, and done it well.