Vodka Diaries is about a series of murders that never happened, a string of suspects who never existed and a cop who never was one.

Director Kushal Srivastava attempts to do a Christopher Nolan with his debut film, but even as he piles on body after body in a string of unexplained deaths, he isn’t able to build the intrigue. The result? A 120-minute headache of a film that makes you eye the exit door when you aren’t burying your head in despair in your tub of popcorn. Or you might be doing both.

The film, however, starts promisingly, with an aerial shot of top cop Ashwini Dixit (Kay Kay Menon) running through the snow-covered roads of Manali, with someone in hot pursuit. The narrative abruptly cuts to Dixit in a hotel room, where he’s spouting romantic poetry to his wife Shikha (Mandira Bedi). The couple are on holiday, but as soon as Dixit — who often gets nightmares of Shikha lying dead in a pool of blood — gets back home, he is buried neck-deep in a murder case. 

The clues left behind lead to a local hotel called Vodka Diaries — hence the name of the film — but before Dixit can solve the first one, a couple of more murders — all connected to the hotel — take place. A mysterious woman called Roshni Banerjee (Raima Sen) flits in and out of the crime scenes, a book called ‘Redemption of a Murderer’ is left behind after every murder and finally, the wife goes missing. Think we have a juicy murder mystery in our hands? Well, not quite. 

Vodka Diaries comes undone even before it hits interval point, with Srivastava wading, pretty much disastrously, into Shutter Island territory. Dixit sees all the murder victims walking nonchalantly on the streets, even his own assistant Ankit (Sharib Hashmi) fails to recognise him and Roshni keeps popping up to warn him to solve the mystery soon if he wants to see his wife again. 

It’s too much to take in, with the grating background score, too many threads and subplots and a hammy Kay Kay making things worse. The man finally lands up on a hospital bed, even as we are told he was never a cop to begin with. And that’s no spoiler. 

Vodka Diaries squanders the promise of a premise with potential since the atmospherics were built pretty well with the contrast of Manali’s dark alleys and white snow-capped peaks. Even a dependable Kay Kay flounders as he tries to make sense of the mess around him. It doesn’t help that there is very little chemistry — an essential element of the film’s intrigue — between him and Mandira. Raima has little to do but shines in the few scenes she has. 

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