Gajab Raat (2026) · ⭐⭐⭐½ (3.5/5)

Dir. Ritesh Shah · Manoj Bajpayee, Aditi Sandhya Sharma, Akshay Oberoi, Divya Dutta · 124 min · Hindi

Streaming on Netflix

*

A corrupt cop, a dying girl, and one Delhi night that nobody wants to end well — this is the sort of thriller that understands a bent policeman can still be the most honest man in the room.

Arya falls out of a moving car in the middle of Connaught Place, grievously hurt, and within minutes the machinery starts. Investigating officer Ajay Nirvit catches the case, and everything about him says he is on the take: the flash of a wristwatch, the eagerness to be paid, the way he calls his superiors sir four times in a sentence. What the film quietly establishes is that being on the take and being bought are different things, and Ajay has never been the second one.

From there it is a tug of war over a hospital bed. Politicians want the girl gone before she can speak, hooded men are sent to finish what the car started, and a CBI officer arrives not to investigate but to take the file away. One night, real-time pressure, everyone lying to everyone else about what the girl knows.

The cast is the reason this hums. There are no wasted faces here — Divya Dutta, Meghna Agarwal, Satyen Chaturvedi, Shraddha Das, Saqib Saleem, Nushrratt Bharuccha, Kiku Sharda all get one clean turn each and nobody is padding a scene. It gives the night the texture of a real city where everybody is connected to somebody who is connected to money.

But the film runs on Manoj Bajpayee. He plays the deference of the inveterately corrupt as a weapon — the little sir-sir-sir ritual that lets him put a superior in his place without ever raising his voice — and the performance has a moral graph that moves scene by scene without ever landing anywhere comfortable. Watch his face when he works out that this girl is worth more to him alive than the bribe is worth dead. It is the best work he has done in a while, on a firm sense of a man who takes money but will not be swallowed whole.

Ritesh Shah, a screenwriter stepping behind the camera, keeps the film unusually tight. The plotting is efficient rather than airtight — the conspiracy is a decent machine, screwed together well enough to carry you from one phone call to the next, and the runtime is all muscle. Very little of it sags, which for a one-night thriller is the whole battle.

Where it thins out is the back half. A story this compressed eventually has to explain itself, and the explanation arrives more conveniently than the setup deserves — the last stretch of the night is the least interesting part of it. A couple of the later revelations are there to close the door rather than to surprise anybody. In fairness, the film knows exactly what it is, and it never asks to be mistaken for a serious autopsy of Delhi's power structures.

The newspapers have been harsher on it than it deserves. This is a well-built Friday-night thriller with a leading performance that is better than the plot underneath it, and there is no dishonour in that. It was originally called Ghooskhor Pandat and was renamed after an uproar — which, honestly, tells you more about the current moment than anything in the film does.

Tight, decent, and carried with relish. Turn it on expecting a good night and it will deliver about eighty of them.