Manorama Six Feet Under

Manorama Six Feet Under
Movie poster for Manorama Six Feet Under
Directed by	Navdeep Singh
Produced by	Ketan Maroo
Written by	Devika Bhagat Navdeep Singh
Starring	Abhay Deol Raima Sen Gul Panag
Music by	Jayesh Gandhi Raiomond Mirza
Cinematography	Arvind Kannabiran
Edited by	Jabeen Merchant
Distributed by	Shemaroo Entertainment
Release date	21 September 2007
Running time	138 minutes
Country	India
Language	Hindi
Budget	₹13.4 crore (equivalent to ₹28 crore or US$4.2 million in 2016)
Box office	₹15.1 crore (equivalent to ₹32 crore or US$4.7 million in 2016)

Manorama Six Feet Under is a 2007 Indian thriller film directed and co-written by Navdeep Singh. The film features Abhay Deol, Raima Sen and Gul Panag in the lead roles. The film released on 21 September 2007.

The movie is a neo-noir with an amateur detective in a small sleepy town from Rajasthan who finds himself caught in a web of lies, deceit and murder. This movie is based on Chinatown (1974) by Roman Polanski, with the basic premise being similar to the original, despite changes in the representation of characters and some key plot points. In a cinema-noir style, the makers of Manorama Six Feet Under acknowledge the inspiration from the original by playing the sequence where Jack Nicholson's character gets his nose slashed on the main character's (Satyaveer) television.

The film opens with a narrative about a nondescript town called Lakhot in Rajasthan, India. The narrator is Satyaveer Singh Randhawa (Abhay Deol), a down-on-his-luck public works engineer. He compares Lakhot – dry, desolate and despondent – to the general downturn in his own life. As he returns to his irritable and nagging wife Nimmi and their young son, we learn that Satyaveer has just been implicated in a small bribery scandal at work. Nimmi (Gul Panag) broods over how she wishes she had married a richer fellow. Satyaveer, an aspiring writer whose only novel Manorama sank without a trace, laments about how he had once wished to be famous but is now resigned to a banal and unremarkable existence.

They have an unusual visitor that night. A well dressed, affluent woman presents herself as Mrs. P. P. Rathore, the wife of the Irrigation Minister (and former Maharaja, presumably prior to Independence) P. P. Rathore (Kulbhushan Kharbanda). She says she is a big fan of Satyaveer's novel. Captivated by the ingenuity of the detective Raghu, the principal character of the novel, she hopes to secure Satyaveer's assistance in applying the same ingenuity to procure photographic evidence of her husband's affair. She pays him an advance and leaves. Satyaveer accepts the job in spite of Nimmi's reproach. He stealthily stakes out Rathore's manor. He spots another woman visiting Rathore. Rathore rebukes the woman and turns her away. Satyaveer snaps a few pictures of this exchange and hands over the roll to Mrs. Rathore. He also confides in his brother-in-law and best friend, the loutish but generally well-meaning local cop Brij Mohan (Vinay Pathak). Brij finds this all very fishy and advises Satyaveer to take Nimmi on a short vacation. Strange events happen to Satyaveer. He finds out that the woman who hired him is not Mrs. Rathore; the real Mrs. Rathore is an invalid. Late one evening, as Satyaveer returns home after drinks with Brij, he spots the same woman running for her life from people who are out to kill her. She earnestly urges him to remember her real name, Manorama (Sarika), and that she is 32 years old. The next day's papers report that Manorama committed suicide in connection with her protests against a canal being built through Lakhot. The canal project is sponsored by Rathore.