DETECTIVE UJJWALAN Review

Man, seeing RRR a couple of years ago really opened up a whole new world of cinema for me.

Ever since then, I occasionally switch on the ol' Netflix and just search for "Bollywood" or "India" and see what turns up and looks good. It's how I've found other movies I have reviewed like Salaar and Tu Jhoothi Main Makkaar. And without having heard the stellar word of mouth around RRR, I never would have started down this road. And luckily, Netflix has tons of options at my fingertips.

Well recently I got that itch again, and Netflix offered me up Detective Ujjwalan, a 2025 film recently imported to the streaming giant. After measuring it against a few other options (time was admittedly a deciding factor, as movies from India tend to lean towards fairly extravagant runtimes; Detective Ujjwalan had a relatively bite-sized two hour and four minute length), I decided to see what it was.

Detective Ujjwalan is the story of a man from a small village in India who has a love for and fascination with detective fiction from around the world. He even has a small lending library that only has mystery novels. Early in the movie, we see his parents trying to marry him off, and now that I think about it, that's a plot point that never goes anywhere or resolves into anything. Huh.

ANYWAY, Ujjwalan has taken it upon himself to be the hero of the village, solving small cases for the residents using the instincts he has picked up from his heroes. However, when a man in a sack-mask murders one of the villagers, Ujjwalan finds himself in over his head. He and police promptly arrest the wrong man, as they discover when another murder happens shortly after the arrest.

A criminal investigator by the name of Shambhu is sent to the village to help the incompetent police force get the real killer, and Ujjwalan soon ends up in direct conflict with him. Is it because, as Ujjwalan believes, Shambhu is actually the killer? And if he isn't, which one will crack the case first?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Detective Ujjwalan shifts gears quite successfully, going from a Comedy to a Thriller pretty effectively and with some decent subtlety. It doesn't ever feel like the two genres are butting up against each other or in conflict. A lot of movies with tonal shifts struggle a great deal to measure how how to move from one mode to another, but that is not the case here.

The movie starts out as a simple comedy about this silly man from a small village who uses his sharpened insight to find missing goats or lost jewelry; but it spins fairly early on when the murders start. From there, we see Ujjwalan face ridicule and scorn from his friends and neighbors, creating a sympathetic dramatic element before going full murder mystery thriller in the third act.

It's all well told and very entertaining! I always appreciate a movie that can move so fluidly from one tone to another.

+ The dynamic between Ujjwalan and CI Shambhu is entertaining and realistic. Their rivalry really works and drives the story forward. When Shambhu first arrives in town and begins putting down Ujjwalan and his efforts, the two work as rivals straight away. And as Ujjwalan is our core protagonist, when Shambhu has embarrassed him and relegated him to the sidelines, we sympathize with him. Their relationship grows into a new layer in the third act, but I don't want to spoil too much here to get into that.

The casting of Dhyan Sreenivasan as Ujjwalan and Siju Wilson as Shambhu obviously helps the movie out a great deal. They have strong chemistry in their scenes together. Each of them is also a respectable actor when their counterpart is not on screen (especially Sreenivasan, as he carries much of the picture by himself).

- One of the biggest factors in deciding to go with an Indian cinema movie choice is the song and dance numbers, and those are sadly lacking in Detective Ujjwalan. There are a few songs, sure, but they are just OK and don't really have much memorability tom them. And they don't have fun dances to go with them.

I get that I can't expect every Bollywood adjacent movie to have a "Naatu Naatu" level song that goes on to win an Academy Award and enters the cultural zeitgeist, but I would have appreciated something along the lines of Paathan's musical beats that added a fair amount of enjoyment to that picture and allowed the actors to get in on the fun.

- While the ride there is quite fun, when you get to the climax and the end of the movie, there is a 15 minute "And now we explain the plot" moment where the killer's backstory and methodology is revealed. It grinds everything to a halt right around the time the action has peaked. 

Luckily, there is an action set piece that breaks up the exposition moment, but you still spend far too long in the finale of the movie with things being explained. I think that might just be the modus operandi of murder mystery movies to a degree, but here, I was really engaged, and then, for just a little bit, kind of bored and pulled out of the film.

Detective Ujjwalan is another fun effort from India that gives us a genre-blending bit of comedy in our murder mystery plot. It's not quite as good at that as, say, a Knives Out movie, but it still has a high quality atmosphere that is well worth your time. One note I didn't get to in the Ups and Downs was that the lighting wasn't always the best, but that's a relatively forgivable error for an otherwise quite enjoyable flick. You could always argue the lighting is thematic, too, given the setting of the picture.

🍿 SCORE = 70 / 100