Guptodhoner Sondhane (2018)

Drawing heavily from Satyajit Ray’s Feluda stories and the adventures of Indiana Jones, Dhrubo Banerjee’s new treasure hunt adventure flick has all the ingredients required to become a crowd pleaser, which it is. Banerjee knows his audience’s psyche like the back of his hand, and he plays on their likes and dislikes, taking them along on a rollercoaster ride that makes no pretence of being intelligent and is pure unabashed fun instead. Banerjee’s protagonist is a half-Feluda-half-Indiana-Jones like character named Subarna Sen (fondly referred to as Sona Da) who is a professor of History at Oxford University. When he returns to India, Sona Da meets Abir, his nephew. Abir takes Sona Da to their ancestral home in the village of Manikantapur, where Abir’s eccentric but erudite maternal uncle (Goutam Ghose, in a lovely little cameo) has recently passed away under mysterious circumstances. When they reach the village, Sona Da and Abir learn of a rural lore that talks about a 350-year-old Mughal treasure hidden somewhere in the ancestral palace where the erstwhile zamindars lived. Abir’s eccentric maternal uncle was the last in line of the zamindar dynasty and he has left a clue in his diary that would help Abir locate the treasure. With the help of Sona Da’s razor sharp wit, the bumbling Abir and his love interest — the beautiful Jhinuk — embark upon a dangerous quest for the hidden treasure, even as a local goon, a descendant of the ministers of the zamindars tries to race them to the finish.