Ritesh Shah’s ‘Gajab Raat’: Manoj Bajpayee Saves a Corrupt Cop, But Not Quite the Netflix Thriller

There is a potentially gripping film buried inside “Gajab Raat,” the new Hindi thriller directed by Ritesh Shah and written by Shah with Neeraj Pandey. It has a morally compromised policeman, a mysterious woman fighting for her life, competing intelligence agencies and powerful people anxious to keep an explosive secret from coming out. Most importantly, it has Manoj Bajpayee, an actor who can make even a thoroughly disreputable character fascinating to watch.

The film, released on Netflix on October 23, 2026, unfolds over a single night in New Delhi. Its central question is deceptively simple: what happens when a corrupt policeman, accustomed to selling his services to the highest bidder, finds himself protecting someone whom powerful people want silenced?

Netflix describes the film as a story in which a police officer’s reluctant compassion for an injured woman exposes a conspiracy at the highest levels. That premise offers an opportunity for a tense thriller about institutional corruption, political interference and the fragile possibility of individual conscience. Source: Netflix’s official film listing .

Yet “Gajab Raat” never quite reconciles its ambitions with its storytelling. The film moves briskly, and Bajpayee gives it an unusually watchable protagonist. But as the mystery expands, the plot becomes less convincing, the suspense less sustained and the political commentary more cautious than its subject warrants.

A Crooked Cop at the Center of a Dangerous Night

Bajpayee plays Sub-Inspector Ajay Nirvit, a Delhi policeman who has turned corruption into a way of life. He takes bribes, manipulates people and knows how to exploit the connections that govern the city’s informal power structure. He is neither an idealistic officer brought down by a rotten system nor a conventional hero waiting for the right moment to reveal his virtue. He is an active participant in the corruption he encounters.

His routine is disrupted when a severely injured young woman, played by Aditi Sandhya Sharma, is found after apparently jumping from a moving car near Connaught Place. Her identity and the circumstances surrounding her injuries become the focus of an increasingly complicated investigation.

The case attracts the attention of several powerful interests, including officers from the Central Bureau of Investigation and the National Investigation Agency, as well as a social activist played by Shraddha Das. Akshay Oberoi and Saqib Saleem portray officers whose involvement complicates Ajay’s efforts to control the situation.

As the competing interests converge, Ajay finds himself caught between the prospect of personal gain and the possibility that the injured woman’s fate is connected to something much larger. The question is not simply whether he will solve the case, but how much he is willing to risk—and whether a man who has spent years exploiting the system can suddenly stand against it.

The premise is familiar territory for a political thriller, but the character at its center is more interesting than the mystery itself. Ajay’s corruption is not a convenient character flaw that the film can erase with a single heroic gesture. It is the foundation of his personality and the means through which he understands power.

That moral ambiguity gives “Gajab Raat” its best moments.

Bajpayee Makes an Unheroic Hero Compelling

Bajpayee is the film’s principal strength. He plays Ajay with a mixture of cynicism, shameless charm and guarded curiosity, allowing the character’s contradictions to emerge without turning him into a caricature.

Ajay is a man who lies instinctively and treats relationships as potential transactions. Yet Bajpayee gives him enough intelligence and self-awareness to make his calculations entertaining. His character can be funny without becoming harmless, and occasionally humane without suddenly becoming virtuous.

That balance is crucial. A lesser performance might have made Ajay merely despicable or, at the other extreme, transformed him too quickly into a conventional action hero. Bajpayee makes the uncertainty itself interesting. Even when Ajay appears to be doing the right thing, the audience has reason to wonder what he expects to gain.

In its October 24 review, The Hollywood Reporter India praised Bajpayee’s portrayal of a morally compromised policeman, arguing that his performance nearly rescues a thriller whose storytelling falters. The review particularly noted the effectiveness of a character who remains morally grey even as he begins moving toward redemption.

The supporting cast provides several welcome counterpoints. Divya Dutta, as a politician, brings authority to her scenes, while Rajiv Gupta supplies some of the film’s more effective comic exchanges with Bajpayee. Oberoi and Saleem contribute to the atmosphere of institutional rivalry, although their characters are not developed as fully as the premise demands.

Das’s social activist is another potentially important presence, representing the pressure that public scrutiny can bring to an investigation. But the film does not always give its supporting characters sufficient space to become more than pieces in the central conspiracy.

Bajpayee is the film’s principal strength. He plays Ajay with a mixture of cynicism, shameless charm and guarded curiosity, allowing the character’s contradictions to emerge without turning him into a caricature.

The result is an ensemble that looks promising on paper but too often revolves around Bajpayee’s performance rather than developing a genuinely complex network of competing motives.

When Speed Substitutes for Suspense

The film’s one-night structure ought to create mounting tension. Every new revelation should narrow Ajay’s choices, heighten the danger to the injured woman and make the consequences of his decisions more immediate.

Instead, “Gajab Raat” sometimes confuses movement with momentum.

Characters enter, exchange information, make ominous phone calls and announce new complications. The camera keeps moving, the background score insists on urgency, and the plot continually introduces another person with an interest in the case. But activity is not the same as suspense. A thriller becomes gripping when the audience understands what is at stake and can feel the consequences of each decision—not merely when another twist arrives.

This is one of the weaknesses identified by The Hollywood Reporter India, which found the film’s sensationalist style and fast-paced score at odds with the wry character Bajpayee is creating. The review also questioned the length of some scenes and argued that the film’s final act appeared hesitant about the implications of its own conspiracy.

Cinema Express, in its October 23 review, offered a somewhat more favorable assessment, praising the pace, performances and dialogue while noting that the background music felt generic and that the final act relied too heavily on exposition.

The criticism is fair. The film’s initial mystery is effective because it limits what Ajay—and the audience—knows. As more information emerges, however, the screenplay increasingly relies on explanations and revelations rather than allowing the tension to develop organically.

The result is a second half that feels less assured than the opening. The conspiracy grows, but its emotional and political consequences do not always become clearer. Ajay’s change of heart, meanwhile, requires a degree of faith from the audience that the screenplay has not entirely earned.

The Political Thriller That Hesitates

There is a larger ambition behind “Gajab Raat.” Its corrupt policeman operates in a city where influence matters more than procedure and where powerful people expect the police to protect their interests. The investigation raises questions about accountability, the suppression of inconvenient truths and the ability of ordinary people to challenge institutions that appear beyond scrutiny.

The film also understands the role of public visibility in contemporary politics. Images of the injured woman spread online, making it harder for the authorities to control the narrative. Public attention becomes another force in the struggle over who will investigate the case and what information will be allowed to emerge.

These elements give the story contemporary relevance. But the film is less successful at turning them into a sustained critique of power. Its political implications remain broad, while the conspiracy itself threatens to overwhelm the institutional questions that initially make the story compelling.

The Hollywood Reporter India argues that the film seems reluctant to follow its own political implications to their logical conclusion. It presents a system in which officials suppress information and powerful figures seek to avoid accountability, but its resolution gestures toward a more reassuring vision of democratic institutions responding to public pressure.

That tension is perhaps the film’s most revealing weakness. A story about entrenched corruption needs more than one compromised officer discovering his conscience. It needs to show why the system functions as it does, how its participants protect one another and what it costs to challenge it.

Ajay’s transformation offers a personal answer, but the film never fully develops the broader institutional one.

The Controversy Behind the Title

The film arrives with a controversy of its own. It was initially announced as Ghooskhor Pandat, a title that drew objections from members of the Brahmin community, who argued that it insulted their caste and religious identity. Following the backlash, the makers withdrew the original title and promotional material and renamed the film “Gajab Raat.”

What’s on Netflix, in its October 23 account of the film’s release, traced the title change to the protests and ensuing legal controversy. The Hollywood Reporter India also noted that the original title had been abandoned following online trolling and political objections.

The controversy is relevant to the film because its central character is a corrupt policeman, and the original title explicitly connected corruption with a religious-caste identity. The objections raised questions about the difference between satirizing an individual character and appearing to stigmatize an entire community.

The title change, however, does not resolve the larger question of how directly the film is prepared to address institutional corruption. Indeed, the new title is more generic, placing the emphasis on the night in which the action unfolds rather than on the social and political identity implied by the original.

The controversy should not be mistaken for a verdict on the film’s artistic merits. But it forms part of the context in which the film’s treatment of corruption, public power and political sensitivities can be considered.