From the onset of things, The Buckingham Murders might seem like a layered story – a single mother grieving with the untimely death of her child while working in the Police Department is asked to work on a case revolving around a missing boy, only to figure that it is a murder. And to set the expectations here, this isn’t a fast-paced whodunnit wherein you would expect sudden twists and turns. Instead the narrative style here uses the painful vulnerabilities of the protagonist as an underlayer while the central plot of the investigation transpires in a leisurely manner. Having said that, one of the biggest flaws in the writing does lie with the buildup of tension and the transition of the same from one scene to another. Almost every scene seems to be written at an individual level while never allowing the emotions to assimilate in the subsequent scenes. Hence as a viewer, you are never quite settled in the drama that offers very little emotional quotient over the course of its screenplay standing at 100 odd minutes.

When you are trying to execute a complex screenplay while also opting for a limited screentime, the writing needs to be razor sharp and focused. And hence, you can’t have subplots that almost act as tick boxes in the screenplay while having little to no relevance in the overall scheme of things. So the entire subplots of a communal riot being the backdrop of events might have been an interesting proposition on paper, but it didn’t quite do enough to buildup tensions in the screenplay. Also, the LGBTQIA angle also added nothing but a few minutes to the narrative while deviating from the central plot of the film.

There are some interesting moments in the first hour, particularly with respect to the buildup when the investigation around the missing boy is kickstarted. There is a silent trauma engulfing the narrative, both for the protagonist given her personal loss (and being obliged to carry out her duty) and for the family of the victims featuring a doting mother and a misogynistic father. These were interesting ideas that momentarily held my attention. But the writing doesn’t capitalize on these aspects while being heavily focused on the police procedurals, and that too in a rather vapid manner. The fizz in the screenplay was missing while also faltering with the atmospherics of the drama that don’t quite create that mood of a whodunnit at any stage.

There are several moments wherein you will feel that the case has been resolved but credit to the writers for holding on to the mystery until the very end. And while the shocking twist was indeed unexpected, I couldn’t help with the fact that the transition scenes in the second hour were almost like speedbreakers that never really allowed me to invest in any of the characters and their actions. This, even as the writers briefly flirted with the idea of using Roshomon Effect to reconstruct the flashback at frequent junctures in the screenplay. This drama was a toss up between working on the atmospherics versus focusing on the urgency of the situation, and at the end it felt stuck somewhere in between. As a result, the abrupt sense of urgency at the end of the film was short-lived and had no real buildup in zeroing on the eventual perpetrator. Even the parallel plot of grief that supposedly was meant to be a dichotomy with respect to the other end of the spectrum for the protagonist at the end , also did not quite come together. Overall, the screenplay had its moments but ended up being just about middling (or perhaps even a notch lower).