The story is as old as time. A rich aristocrat with many sins to his name is dead. An investigation begins. Lies unfold. Tragedies come to light. A recipe for a great whodunnit. To this, director Honey Trehan adds the tadka of Inspector Jatil, a morally complex police officer. If you haven’t watched Raat Akeli Hai (2020), spoiler alert. When the powerful and influential Raghuveer Singh’s death is being investigated by Jatil, he discovers that it was his rape victim who killed him. What follows is not the pursuit of justice as the law defines it, but justice as Jatil understands it. Jatil refuses to mourn a predator simply because he was wealthy. Instead, he aligns himself with the women the system has long abandoned.

With such sensibilities, Jatil enters the next film in this universe, Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders, now out on Netflix. The film opens with the massacre of the media-owning, influential Bansal family. It is Trehan’s classic recipe of a whodunnit with social commentary that leaves you uncomfortably exposed. If the first film took down the patriarchy, the second one takes on the media ecosystem.