Neeyat (Motive) is a 2023 Indian Hindi-language mystery film, directed by Anu Menon, and produced by Vikram Malhotra under Abundantia Entertainment alongside Amazon Prime Video.
The film stars Vidya Balan as CBI officer and detective Mira Rao, who arrives at the birthday getaway of fugitive Indian billionaire Ashish Kapoor (Ram Kapoor) on an isolated Scottish island castle. She must use all her skills to solve a mysterious murder that occurs on the island, unraveling the devious motives of Kapoor's close friends and family - played by an Ensemble Cast that includes Rahul Bose, Dipannita Sharma, Shashank Arora, Shahana Goswami, Neeraj Kabi and Amrita Puri. Neeyat was released theatrically on 7 July 2023.
Neeyat provides examples of the following tropes:
- Ambiguous Situation: It's never made clear if Ashish Kapoor was truly guilty of the murder of his cancer-stricken wife years ago. He had the motive and opportunity, and Jimmy was convinced he did it, but there was no concrete evidence.
- Closed Circle: Due to a violent storm, the suspects and the detective are all trapped on the island.
- Faking the Dead: Ashish Kapoor is revealed to be doing this towards the end of the film. His plan was to fake his suicide in front of multiple witnesses, including a CBI officer, and flee to a new life with his embezzled fortune.
- Identity Impersonator: Right at the end of the film, it's revealed that the detective who'd been investigating the case all along wasn't the real 'Mira Rao' but an imposter who'd snuck onto the island before the storm. She was the lover of one of Ashish Kapoor's ex-employees, who commited suicide as a result of the financial ruin she faced when Kapoor embezzled money from his company and stopped paying his employees. As 'Mira Rao', her goal was to acquire the documents that would definitively prove Ashish Kapoor's guilt and reveal where he'd stashed his ill-gotten gains. She just ended up having to investigate his murder first...
- Karmic Death: Ashish Kapoor faked his death by pretending he'd fallen off a cliff, so that he could evade justice. By the end of the film, while attempting to flee he accidentally falls to his death from the same cliff, making his false scenario real.
- Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Ishaan Suri, Noor and Sanjay Suri's son, is revealed to be the product of a one-night-stand between his mother and Ashish Kapoor's brother-in-law Jimmy Mistry.
- The Mole: Event manager Tanveer Shah, and Rayan Kapoor's girlfriend Gigi, are both revealed to be undercover reporters investigating Ashish Kapoor for his large-scale fraud and its impact on countless families.
- Ashish Kapoor's own girlfriend, Lisa, is revealed to be one too - planted in his inner circle by India's corrupt Industries Minister to keep an eye on the fugitive billionaire.
- Ripped from the Headlines: Ashish Kapoor's backstory of being a billionaire Indian industrialist who fled overseas to escape justice after being accussed of defrauding banks mirrors several notorious Real Life cases of Indian billionaires doing the same.
- Summation Gathering: In classic whodunnit style, Mira Rao holds one towards the end of the movie.
- Transparent Closet: Played for Laughs. Jimmy dramatically and emotionally confesses his love for a man to a group of gathered friends and family. It falls comically flat when the family and friends admit that they already knew — all of them.
- Who Murdered the Asshole: Many of the friends and family gathered on the island for Ashish Kapoor's birthday party had motives for wanting to kill the man - his stepson Rayan who blamed him for his mother's death, his brother-in-law Jimmy Mistry who hated him for usurping the Mistry family legacy and possibly murdering his sister, his friends the Suris for controlling them with his money and potentially taking back the home he'd gifted them, and even his niece Sasha for not paying her school fees on time.
- The irony of course is that none of them murdered him (though some of them tried), and he was Faking the Dead all along.
