Raat Akeli Hai

Raat Akeli Hai (transl. The Night Is Lonely) is a 2020 Indian Hindi-language crime thriller film directed by Honey Trehan.^[2] The film stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Radhika Apte, Shweta Tripathi, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Shivani Raghuvanshi, Nishant Dahiya, Gyanendra Tripathi, Ila Arun, Swanand Kirkire, Nitesh Kumar Tiwari, and Aditya Srivastava. It follows a small-town cop who is summoned to investigate the death of an elderly family member.^[3][4] The film was released on Netflix on 31 July 2020.^[5]

The film received critical acclaim for the cast performances and direction, with Siddiqui winning the award for Best Actor at the Filmfare OTT Awards while the film also won Best Film at the ceremony.

A sequel titled Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders was released in 2025.

In a remote area of Uttar Pradesh, a truck runs a car off the road and the truck driver brutally murders the car's occupants - a lady and her driver. He takes the bodies to a tannery and burns them with acid, but accidentally spills the acid on one of his own hands.

Five years later, Sub-Inspector Jatil Yadav is frustrated by his mother's incessant attempts to arrange a marriage for him. While at a colleague's wedding, Jatil is summoned to investigate the murder of a rich aristocrat named Raghuveer Singh. Jatil learns that Raghuveer was murdered by his own gun on his wedding night and is further intrigued by the family's reticence on the matter. Jatil is introduced to the family by Ramesh Chauhan, brother of Raghuveer Singh's first wife (who was murdered 5 years ago). Members of Raghuveer's family include his two children Karuna and Karan, his sister-in-law and matriarch of the house Pramila Singh, her children Vikram and Vasudha, Ravi Sisodia, the volatile husband of Karuna, the maid of the house Chunni, and Raghuveer's young bride-to-be, Radha. As Jatil starts his investigation, he finds that Raghuveer's family are a complicated bunch with their own secrets and lies.

During the course of his investigation, Jatil observes that the rest of the family resents Radha (who was previously Raghuveer's mistress) and treats her as an outsider. Jatil remembers a previous incident when he had stopped Radha from committing suicide from a running train. Jatil develops a soft spot for Radha. He learns that Vikram, who is engaged to the daughter of powerful MLA Munna Raja, discovered the body. Radha tells Jatil that she was in love with Vikram and planned to elope, but he only used and discarded her once the opportunity arose to shack up with Munna Raja's daughter.

Jatil finds erotic magazines in Raghuveer's cupboard and some photos of women, revealing him to be a serial abuser. Jatil's investigation style leads to conflict with Ravi, who brings Munna Raja into the picture. Jatil also spots Chunni's grandmother, who has gone senile after her son (the family's driver) was murdered five years ago and the case was closed without investigation. Jatil digs into the cold case, leading him to a tannery in Jajmau operated by a menacing butcher, but secretly owned by Munna Raja. Under pressure from his politically connected boss, Jatil nonetheless continues his investigation, unravelling the many rivalries and disagreements between the various family members.

The next morning, Chunni is found strangled to death in the backyard of the mansion. Jatil's bosses give the order to arrest Radha, but Jatil, now convinced of her innocence, rescues her from the mansion. The butcher of Jajmau catches up with them on a train but Jatil and Radha manage to throw him off in the ensuing scuffle and injure him. While Jatil and Radha reach Raghuveer's Gwalior farmhouse, where he used to bring his various women, forensics concludes that Chunni's killer is a man with burnt skin and scars on his hands.

Jatil's colleague Nandu sees a man matching Chunni's killer's description in the police office with Munna Raja. Becoming convinced that Jatil's theory about Radha's innocence is correct, he goes to Chunni's grandmother and shows her a picture of the butcher. Jatil confronts Radha about her scarf that he found in Raghuveer's room, so she reveals that she planned on exposing her own affair with Vikram to Raghuveer and dragged him to the old man's bedroom, only to find Raghuveer already dead. Vikram then obfuscated the timings and evidence with the help of Chunni, presumably to frame Radha. Jatil turns Radha in to another police station to placate his bosses.

Jatil tracks down a medical report that notes that an abortion was performed on Raghuveer's first wife one day before her death. Following up, he finds many inconsistencies in the way her death was reported and investigated. Going back to the farmhouse, he finds that Raghuveer's wife kept track of the women he brought there. He also finds the same erotic magazine, photographs, and a boarding school badge. Elsewhere, Munna Raja and Jatil's boss decide to eliminate Radha on the pretext of transferring her from one station to another, but Jatil anticipates the plot. In the ensuing shootout, Munna Raja's goons are killed and Radha receives a minor wound, but the butcher escapes. As he returns to Jajmau, Chunni's grandmother douses him in fuel and sets him on fire, killing him.

Jatil returns to the mansion with Radha in tow, explaining the chain of events: the butcher killed Raghuveer's wife and her driver (Chunni's father) five years ago on orders of Munna Raja, who in turn was persuaded by Pramila. Raghuveer's wife had found that he was serially raping Vasudha, resulting in an abortion and Vasudha being expelled from her school. Pramila then had Raghuveer's wife murdered to prevent controversies and possibly having Raghuveer take her children out of his will. Pramila brokers a deal with Munna Raja to get the lion's share of Raghuveer's properties transferred to her family.

On the night of the wedding, Vasudha confronted Raghuveer, only to have him dismiss and insult her. In a fit of rage, she murdered her uncle with his own gun. Afterwards, she exchanged her blood-soaked scarf with Radha's, something that Jatil noticed on the wedding video. Confronted with the truth, Vikram shuns both his mother and Munna Raja in disgust, breaking off the engagement. Pramila goes to her room to kill herself to avoid arrest. She hears someone entering the room and askes whether is it Vikram. Vasudha replies that it is her. Pramila puts down the gun. A gunshot is then heard. At her cremation, Vasudha confirms that Jatil's version of the events is true.

After the case is solved, an investigation is opened into the involvement of Munna Raja and Jatil's boss SP Lalji Shukla. Meanwhile, Jatil returns home to further pestering by his insistent mother. It is then revealed, from his mother reading the newspaper, the official story is that Pramila killed herself and Vasudha is not mentioned. His mother then asked about "the other girl". Fed up, he catches up with Radha's train as she prepares to leave town, and tells her, "it's a cruel world out there; I can't handle it by myself."

• Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Inspector Jatil Yadav
• Radhika Apte as Radha^[6]
• Shweta Tripathi as Karuna Singh
• Gyanendra Tripathi as Ravi Sisodia
• Tigmanshu Dhulia as Senior SP Lalji Shukla (IPS)
• Shivani Raghuvanshi as Vasudha Singh
• Aditya Srivastava as M.L.A. Munna Raja
• Nishant Dahiya as Vikram Singh
• Padmavati Rao as Pramila Singh
• Ila Arun as Sarita Kumari, Jatil's mother
• Swanand Kirkire as Ramesh Chauhan
• Shree Dhar Dubey as Narendra Singh/ Nandu
• Ravi Sah as Truck Driver / Keval
• Khalid Tyabji as Raghuveer Singh
• Riya Shukla as Chunni

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 100% of 10 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.5/10.^[7]

Saibal Chatterjee of NDTV gave four stars out of five and said, "The film does to the crime and punishment genre what Bulbbul did to the supernatural revenge fantasy - lifts it many notches above the ordinary."^[8] Shubhra Gupta of The Indian Express gave three stars out of five and said, "A few of the bits and pieces in Netflix's Raat Akeli Hai feel a bit contrived, but not enough to take the enjoyment away from a film which has a terrific sense of time and place, and a crime in which everyone has stakes."^[9] Komal Nahta of Film Information said, "It's a well-made and well-enacted whodunit. However, the last about half an hour seems rather implausible and, therefore, is not as exciting as it should’ve been."^[10] Rohan Naahar of Hindustan Times said, "Raat Akeli Hai is quite the achievement. Trehan not only has a skill for directing actors, but also displays a command over tone and visual texture."^[11]

The music for the film was composed by Sneha Khanwalkar while the lyrics written by Raj Shekhar and Swanand Kirkire.

In November 2025, Netflix officially announced a sequel titled Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders. Nawazuddin Siddiqui reprising his role as Inspector Jatil Yadav, who returns to probe a chilling, cold-blooded mass murder within the powerful Bansal family.^[13][14][15]

• Raat Akeli Hai at IMDb
• Raat Akeli Hai on Netflix
• Raat Akeli Hai at Bollywood Hungama