Teresa Reviews Ragala 24 Gantallo (2019)
Teresa reviews Ragala 24 Gantallo (2019) and called this adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “The Unexpected Guest” a roller-coaster movie you’d want to see twice.
(Translation: In the Next 24 Hours)
Source: We bought ours on ebay, but as of 6/29/2024 I see a version with English subtitles on YouTube.
(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel
Fidelity to text: 3 knives
The play’s heart is there: an abused wife and a stranger who helps her conceal her husband’s murder for reasons of his own.
Quality of film: 4½ knives
You’ll want to watch this twice to savor how carefully the film sets up the twist climax in the opening scene. Agatha would be proud.
Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.
Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.
The Unexpected Guest, a play Agatha wrote in 1958, has taken on an unexpected second life in the Indian film industry. It’s been remade several times. We saw Dhund (1973) which follows the text surprisingly closely. But watching Dhund does not mean you’ll recognize this plot. You’ll still be surprised (we were!) by the final revelations, one piled up on top of another.
The film’s a contemporary, so you’ll see plenty of inadvertent documentary shots of modern India where the past is never far away from the present. It’s also got some amazingly unbelievable sequences, making you question if Indian cinema has ever seen a real surgical patient or if Indian police would really be that corrupt. And how did they get away with it? No answers, but you won’t care that much because the film’s a thrilling and visually impressive ride.
It opens in the most traditional way: it’s a dark and stormy night (monsoon season, I guess). Police Commissioner Narasimha is watching the evening news with horror. Three condemned prisoners, guilty of the violent rape and murder of an up-and-coming model named Meghana have escaped. They’re on the loose, ready to terrorize the country. He calls a press conference to reassure the media and the citizens that he’ll move heaven and earth to recapture the murderous criminals. His men will be checking every car on every road, bus stops, and train stations despite the frightful weather.
But he hasn’t caught the trio of deadly convicts yet, as we watch them race down deserted, rain-washed streets. They spot a police car before it spots them and leap over a high gate into the courtyard of a luxurious house.
We’ve already, briefly, met the gorgeous lady of the house, Vidya (Laura Warwick). She had to fend off a nosy neighbor, looking for her husband, Rahul (Richard Warwick). He’s away. She’s alone. She’s certainly not going to let that fool into her home.
But Vidya can’t stop the convicts from entering. But she doesn’t react quite right and ends up, in fear of her own life, hiding them in an upstairs wardrobe from the nosy next-door neighbor. But when she opens the wardrobe, her dead husband falls out to everyone’s surprise. It’s a jump scare and a laugh at the same time.
She confesses to murdering her husband to the convicts who aren’t as murderous as you’d expect given what Police Commissioner Narasimha said to the media. They’re … taken aback.
This leads to a lengthy series of flashbacks showing how Rahul met Vidya, swept her off her feet in a very creepy courtship, and married her. Her father figure, the owner of the orphanage that she was raised at, encourages her to marry this wealthy, famous, handsome photographer, filmmaker, and director of successful commercials.
Along with Vidya, we quickly learn what a cruel psycho Rahul truly is. His palatial home (don’t forget to ogle the décor, including that light-up staircase!) is a monument to his ego. Virtually every vertical surface is an I-Love-Me wall, plastered with his photographs showing off his manly good looks and prowess with a camera. If someone else is in the picture, you know that Rahul took the picture because only his pictures are good enough to adorn his house.
Like the grand house, his abused employee Das, and his production staff, Vidya is his property and he doesn’t share.
Vidya, as a good wife, does her best to keep Rahul soothed, despite learning that he videotaped their wedding night to watch over and over. She learns the depths of his perfidy when she becomes pregnant. Tragically, it’s an ectopic pregnancy. When Vidya wakes up in the hospital bed (looking like she’d just come from a magazine photoshoot for Vogue), she learns Rahul had the surgeon give her a hysterectomy. She’ll never have children of her own.
The convicts decide to help her dispose of Rahul’s body if she helps them escape. It’s a tense ride through the rain-soaked streets, made more tense when she meets the police roadblock. But she’s allowed to pass through, her car uninspected. It turns out that the policeman in charge saw blood dripping from her trunk and saw a chance to blackmail an obviously wealthy woman. It wasn’t clear to me why he did it, other than greed because there was no set up or explanation. Think of it as a foreshadowing of greater police corruption to come.
Eventually, Vidya learns why the convicts agreed to help her. They knew she didn’t murder her husband. They (the three of them fill in for Michael Starkwedder) had killed Rahul in revenge for his abuse and murder of Meghana, the model they were accused of raping and murdering. Meghana was their dearest friend who they were helping to break into the business.
Tying Vidya closer to the tragedy was that Rahul forced her to chose his next model and she chose Meghana’s picture. She, like Meghana didn’t know it was for a nude modeling job advertising condoms (Wikipedia told me this because it wasn’t in the subtitles). Meghana objected strenuously, fought back when Rahul tried to force her, and got beaten to death for her pains. Her friends couldn’t save her. They were framed for her murder and sent to jail.
But Rahul didn’t act alone. He has his own highly-placed friend who helped him murder Meghana and, presumably, helped him get away with other crimes we don’t see onscreen. This is where you circle back to the opening scenes and realize that this film uses Agatha’s classic trope: don’t believe what you’re told. Anyone can be the victim and anyone can be the killer. That stalwart officer of the law? You bet he’s a murderer.
There are scenes I had trouble buying, over and above Vidya’s magical loveliness in a hospital bed. How did she manage to clean up that house so completely after finding her husband’s stabbed body? A cleanup job like that would take hours, not to mention dragging his body up that amazing light-up staircase to the upstairs bedroom. Who did she think murdered Rahul? In the play, Laura believes it’s her lover, Julian while he believes she did it. They lie to save each other. But Vidya doesn’t have that kind of relationship with Ganesh. The police corruption seemed over the top too, at least if the Indian police force has any kind of competent forensics. And how did Vidya and we assume the convicts walk away into a happy new day?
But it’s still a rollercoaster of a movie, worth watching twice to see how it all ties together.
