Dark streets and dhotis.

 Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay created Byomkesh Bakshi in 1932, and continued to chronicle his adventures until 1970.  Initially, Byomkesh was closely modeled on Sherlock Holmes; he's an eccentric Bengali intellectual who solves crime through his powers of logic and observation, and is assisted by his loyal friend and roommate Ajit Bannerjee, who also chronicles his adventures.  Byomkesh quickly grows beyond Holmes pastiche, though.  He marries, has a son, buys a car, and develops his own eccentricities as the years pass.  One of his quirks is a dislike of the word 'detective', or worse, 'investigator.'  Byomkesh refers to himself as a Satyanweshi, a seeker of truth, so I don't think he'd approve of the title of 2015's Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!.  He would also be suspicious of the exclamation mark.

The movie opens in 1943 Calcutta. Byomkesh Bakshy (Sushant Singh Rajput) is a recent college graduate who already has a reputation for being extremely clever and kind of annoying.  That's why Ajit Bannerjee (Anand Tiwari) approaches him for help in finding his father, Bhuvan Bannerjee (no actor listed, because SPOILER he's dead and doesn't actually appear in the movie.)  At first, Byomkesh isn't interested, but his girlfriend (Moumita Chakraborty) just announced her engagement to someone else, and he really doesn't have much else to do, so finding a missing person it is!

 

Byomkesh starts his investigation by visiting the hostel where Bhuvan was staying, where he meets the brilliant Doctor Anakul Guha (Neeraj Kabi.)  After some intellectual jousting, Byomkesh finds Bhuvan's paan box, which is filled with cash, keepsakes, and Bhuvan's personal paan formula, which he called 'Calcutta Kiss.'  Byomkesh concludes that Bhuvanm has been murdered, and visits the now-abandoned factory where he used to work and runs into the factory owner's wife and the film's designated femme fatale, film actress Anguri Devi (Swastika Mukherjee).

 

And from there . . . well, it's a mystery, and I don't want to give too much away.  But Byomkesh crosses paths with a violent Japanese dentist (Taka Higuchi), a wealthy politician (Kaushik Ghosh) and his firebrand nephew (Shivam) and sensible niece (Divya Menon), and the notorious drug lord Yang Guang, a master of disguise, manipulation and stabbing.  (One might almost call him the Napoleon of Crime, but nobody actually does.)

 

Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! is not a direct adaptation of any of the Byomkesh Bakshi stories.  Instead, it draws elements from several stories, and then scales them up.  Byomkesh is still the same satyanweshi as before, but this time he's not just solving a clever murder, he's battling his own personal Moriarty in order to save Calcutta from utter ruin.  It's very pulpy, but played entirely straight rather than giggling at its own over-the-topness.

 

There are a lot of movies and TV shows about Byomkesh Bakshi, but it is a shame that, due to Sushant Singh Rajput's untimely death, we're never getting the sequel to this version.  It's a movie that earns its exclamation mark.