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Raat Akeli Hai's writer upset about show's comparison to Daniel Craig's Knives Out: ‘I wrote it in 2013…’
Did Hollywood borrow from Hindi cinema? Writer Smita Singh reveals she registered the Knives Out format in 2013, years before Benoit Blanc arrived on the scene
In the world of streaming, timing is everything and for writer Smita Singh, it’s been a bit of a curse. When the first instalment of Raat Akeli Hai dropped on Netflix in 2020, starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui as the tenacious Inspector Jatil Yadav, the internet was quick to label it ‘India’s Knives Out’. The similarities were hard to ignore: a sprawling mansion, a dead patriarch, and a family dripping with secrets.
But according to Smita, the mind behind Sacred Games S1 and Khauf, the blueprint for her whodunit existed long before Benoit Blanc ever picked up a magnifying glass.
The 2013 blueprint
While Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (2019) became a global phenomenon in 2019, Singh reveals that her script was already gathering dust in her study years prior. “I was so upset I can’t tell you because I wrote it back in 2013,” Singh told SCREEN. “It was bought in 2015! Before that, it went to Sundance Film Festival, where directors from all over the world come.”
The structural parallels are striking, but Smita suggests the original draft was even closer to the Hollywood blockbuster than the final film. “Now, in my script, there’s also a family, a male cop, a patriarch who is murdered, and a poor girl who’s the primary suspect. In Knives Out, the patriarch is also poisoned. That was also the case with the patriarch in my film. We took that track out! Now, imagine what if we had kept the track? We even shot it and then put it out. I just know that I wrote it first and registered it in 2013.”
Smita's take on the ‘who-dunnit’ formula
For Smita, a murder mystery is a failure if it only ends with a name. She views her work as a ‘why-dunnit’ instead of a ‘who-dunnit’, where the killer is often a byproduct of a broken society. Responding to critics who found the tropes of the genre familiar, she notes: “I’ve been getting reactions like, ‘Oh, it’s so predictable the servant did it!’ But do you think about why? Why does crime happen in a certain way? That’s exactly where I want you to look.”
She believes the genre requires a deeper social layer to survive on screen. “There’s a reason why Agatha Christie books couldn’t be adapted into cinema before Knives Out. It has to be about more things. The genre alone doesn’t work.”
Now Smita is left grappling with her own success. Having accidentally created a template where the killer is as much a victim as the deceased, she say's she's not going to be writing any more murder mysteries after Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders (2025). “But ya, I told myself I’m never going to do a whodunit again. It’s very, very difficult,” she said.
