Vidya Balan in Neeyat. (courtesy: balanvidya)

Vidya Balan makes a rather unconventional crime investigator in Anu Menon’s Neeyat – a laconic, straight-faced, hawk-eyed woman who does not waste her breath until it is absolutely essential. She employs silence as a shield and a tool as she ferrets around the ornate interiors of an opulent Scottish seaside castle after its owner jumps off a cliff.

That is about the only semblance of novelty that there is in the plot, which combines some genuinely clever twists with hackneyed hooks and contrived sleights to deliver a whodunnit that is only sporadically effective. The performances, too, are wildly uneven.

While the likes of Neeraj Kabi, Shahana Goswami and Shashank Arora (in the role of a drug-addled drifter) do all that they can to raise the bar, not too many of the rest of the actors in the film are able to produce the sort of goods that could help the narrative offset its weaker stretches.

To be fair, Neeyat gallops along at a fair clip and allows the audience very little time for speculation. While the broad details about the characters who might have a reason to see the castle owner dead are laid out quickly and without much song and dance, the intricacies of the plot and the web of lies that are woven around the death of the tycoon aren’t either revealed until the very end or presented as red herrings.

Balan, reuniting with director Anu Menon three years after Shakuntala Devi, effortlessly slips into the skin of the sedate sleuth. She discards the usual a-woman-who-knows-it-all tropes and uses a low-key, unshowy acting style to convey a range of emotions in a role that allows her to traverse an impressively wide gamut.

The screenplay (Menon, Priya Venkataraman, Advaita Kala and Girvani Dhyani) factors in the flight of a bank loan defaulter and maverick businessman responsible for the suicide of several employees rendered jobless owing to his cavalier practices – a plot detail drawn from contemporary reality.

The sleuth, senior CBI officer Mira Rao, is part Miss Marple and part Benoit Blanc, with shades of Sherlock Holmes. But eventually she pretty much her own beast. In the right place at the right time, she plunges headlong into a case that lands in her lap.

Once she swings into ‘action’, Mira Rao has reason to view everybody in Highgrave Castle, a structure which stands in lonesome splendour on a cliff overlooking a stormy sea in Scotland, as a suspect.

The name of the castle says a lot – not only is bacchanalian excess the norm here given the propensities of industrialist Ashish Kapoor (Ram Kapoor), it also quickly turns into a veritable graveyard for the people who check in to celebrate the birthday of the flashy owner, a man with a shady track record.

As the film nears the end of the first half, people in the castle start losing their lives, beginning, of course, with the bearded, smooth-talking Ashish Kapoor himself. The sleuth happens to be there on a specific mission. She jumps in and begins investigations before the Scotland Yard can get to the island.

Neeyat has the look and feel of a classic crime drama but treads on paths that deviate at times from genre conventions. The setting is familiar – a palatial abode as a site of merriment that conceals many secrets. The gallery of characters does not hold any real surprises either. When the tycoon dies and Mira Rao infers that it isn’t case of suicide but murder, everyone on the guest list is fair game for her.

The film opens with Ashish Kapoor, on the run from the law, inviting his friends and family over for a grand birthday party. He has a surprise dinnertime announcement up his sleeve, which is the reason why the CBI officer has flown in to everyone else’s bewilderment.

Among Kapoor’s guests are his doctor-friend Sanjay Suri (Neeraj Kabi) and his wife and Ashish’s ex-girlfriend Noor (Dipannita Sharma Atwal), his disgruntled son Ryan (Shashank Arora) and his companion Gigi (Prajakta Koli), his tarot card reader and healer Zara (Niki Aneja Walia) with her canine pet, his mistress Lisa (Shahana Goswami), his brother-in-law Jimmy Mistry (Rahul Bose).

Also around are the suave event manager Tanveer (Danesh Razvi) and the the tycoon’s efficient and ever watchful executive assistant, Kamini (Amrita Puri), whose presence in the castle and their part in what transpires there in the course of an eventful night assume great importance as the story unfolds

The characters are trapped in the castle because a severe storm has led to the closing down of the only bridge that connects the island to the mainland. Nobody can get in or out without courting grave danger.

The methods that the film resorts to rest upon making one revelation after another in quick succession and ensuring that the guessing game does not fizzle out. In the last quarter, Neeyat gathers dizzying and reasonable sustained momentum.

When it is time to tie up the ends, the characters gather in a room and Mira Rao begins an inquisition. Secrets tumble out as allegations and confessions fly thick and fast. Soon enough more deaths occur and the list of suspects gets shorter.

You have a motive, the detective says to several of the suspects, but the audience isn’t close to figuring out what she might be hinting at. No matter how forced and hurried parts of the climactic moments might seem, Neeyat is able to sustain the mystery until the final act, with a massive twist or two thrown in for good measure. Therein lies the biggest success of a fast-paced, strictly by-the-book thriller that isn’t exactly a true-blue humdinger but is never in any danger of going bust either.