‘Like Aani Subscribe’ review: Murder mystery doesn’t follow through on its promise

Khushi has a day job but she spends most of her time feeding her social media channel. The kind of person who can’t have a cup of tea without uploading a video about it, Khushi (Jui Bhagwat) has a shocking IRL moment when she stumbles upon a dead body during a livestream. The corpse is that of Rohit (Amey Wagh), revealed through flashbacks to be a confidence trickster.

Documentary filmmaker Deepika (Amruta Khanvilkar) decides to help the beleaguered Khushi and her friend Shruti (Rajasi Bhave). Deepika sets into motion an investigation that loops back to Rohit’s employer Ravi (Shubhankar Tawde), Faisal (Vitthal Kale), who has fallen for one of Rohit’s schemes, and the politician Dadasaheb (Shrikant Yadav), to whom Rohit owes a vast sum of money.

First-time director Abhishek Merukar’s Like Aani Subscribe works only in fits and starts. Merukar’s screenplay has the potential to be a blackly comic thriller. Instead, too much time is spent on setting up scenes and elaborating on the already obvious.

The Marathi-language movie has no business stretching out for 140 minutes when most of its events could have been covered in half the duration. The solution to the murder required greater work, depending as it does on a character’s mystifying decision to...

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