No One Killed Jessica Movie Review

Manish Bhardwaj (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayub) wasn’t No One. A pampered son a politician and therefore high on the sense of power that comes with such pedigree, he cold bloodedly gunned down Jessica (Myra), a model doubling as bartender in an elite Delhi restaurant, with a dozen witnesses to the crime, just because she refused to serve him a drink.

A clear open and shut case it was, or could have been. But Manish’s powerful dad, egged on by the murder’s mother’s constant whine “mere Monu ko kucch nahin hona chahiye” no less than by his blind parental love, pulls the strings, coerces witnesses and manipulates the system to get his pyara beta and his accomplices acquitted. Scot free goes the killer, cocking a snook at everyone with his system-mocking impunity.

Not done, cries Meera Gaity (Rani Mukherjee), a feisty news reporter and anchor given to hardball journalism and smoking ciggies and mouthing profanities, not excluding the F word and the desi G word. Joining forces with Jessica’s sister Sabrina (Vidya Balan) who’s been running pillar to post to seek justice for her dead sister and also taking care of her frail parents, Meera sets out to set the wrong right. “Justice has been denied and I can’t live with it,” she yells at her boss, perched doggedly on his car’s bonnet.

And that’s what the film is primarily about: turning the tables on the powers-that-be and giving the aam aadmi one last say.

No one among us, I’m sure, is unaware of the Jessica Lal case on which the film is based. Perhaps that was the root of a niggling apprehension I had before watching No One Killed Jessica. After all what’s the point of making a film now that justice has been done and the killer is wasting away his youth and mid-age behind bars, not considering the one stray parole he got in 2009 to perform the last rites of his grandmother but was caught clubbing. If the objective of the film was mere documentation of what happened in the Jessica case, one might have better browsed through the archives of national newspapers, the headline of one having inspired the film’s title. But no. No One Killed Jessica goes beyond that. It provides a recollection to the - pardon the cliché - ‘collective conscience’ of us as a society that the gun-toting brats with influential papas and mollycoddling mommies can’t have their way if we the people, including the media, set out to see that justice is done.