Raat Akeli Hai inspired by Knives Out? Varun Grover, Anurag Kashyap share anecdotes to prove otherwise

While Varun Grover said Raat Akeli Hai was written much earlier than even Netflix’s Sacred Games, Anurag Kashyap claimed to have read a rough draft in 2015.

Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap and writer-comedian Varun Grover have backed a Twitter user who said that Raat Akeli Hai was not necessarily inspired by last year’s Hollywood murder mystery Knives Out. Featuring Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Radhika Apte, Raat Akeli Hai marks casting director Honey Trehan’s directorial debut and is set for a direct-to-digital release on Netflix.

Users online had alleged that Raat Akeli Hai is inspired by American film Knives Out.

A Twitter user wrote, “Raat Akeli Hai doesn’t have to be inspired by Knives Out. There’s an entire genre called locked room mystery. Google it. Not everything that you like in pop culture happened two days ago. Takes me back to the time I read some professional Indian film reviewer (I genuinely cannot recall who) writing that Christopher Nolan introduced non-linear narratives in cinema.”

Revealing that the scripting of the upcoming film was completed four years ago, Varun responded to the tweets and wrote, “Smita Singh, the writer, had finished Raat Akeli Hai script much before she started writing Sacred Games S1 in 2016 with us.”

Claiming he read a rough draft even a year earlier than Varun’s mention, Anurag wrote, “I read a draft of it way way back in 2015 .. when I was also eyeing it .. then @HoneyTrehan beat me to it and looks like has done a great job of it.. looking forward ‘Raat Akeli Hai’.”

Also featuring Shweta Tripathi, Ila Arun, Shivani Raghuvanshi, Aditya Srivastava, Tigmanshu Dhulia and others, Raat Akeli Hai is slated for a July 31 release on Netflix.

American mystery film Knives Out, released in 2019, was a modern whodunit that follows a detective investigating the death of a wealthy octogenarian writer. Written and directed by Rian Johnson, the film featured Daniel Craig, Joseph Gordan, Ana de Armas and Chris Evans, among others.

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