Neeyat is a classic whodunnit where a business tycoon named Ashish Kapoor calls his friends and family to his castle in Scotland to celebrate his birthday while his empire is on the brink of collapse. Ashish is familiar with some of the guests, but there are a few characters who are there for their own nefarious purposes. CBI officer Mira Rao is in their presence to arrest Ashish once the celebrations are over and put him on trial in India for committing crores of fraud and being responsible for the deaths by suicide of several of his employees caused by the nonpayment of salaries. However, before she can do that, Ashish mysteriously falls off the cliff and dies. This completely upends her plan and forces her to wear the proverbial detective’s hat and find out the murderer who is hiding amongst the guests.
Spoilers Alert
What Transpires After Ashish Kapoor’s Death?
Zara claims that she’s an eyewitness to Ashish’s death by suicide. Mira refutes that claim by questioning Zara’s eyesight and stating that if Ashish did jump to his death, his body wouldn’t have been facing upward. With that out of the way, Mira starts looking into the guests. Jimmy, who was indebted to his brother-in-law Ashish, is apparently challenging his father’s will, where he made Ashish the owner of his estate instead of Jimmy. Lisa (Ashish’s current love interest) seems to be too dumb to realize that Ashish didn’t give her a real diamond necklace, but she is being blackmailed by somebody. Sasha (the deceased Tahira Kapoor’s adoptive daughter) is miffed about the fact that Ashish failed to submit the fees for the current semester of her education. Kay appears to be innocent and hellbent on proving that one of the guests is the murderer. Zara (Ashish’s therapist) is too cool despite the death of her dog Rumi (due to poisoning) and Ashish.
Mira suspects that the absence of the castle’s staff isn’t due to the storm but because of Tanveer (the event manager), who sent them away so that there won’t be a lot of witnesses. Ishaan (Sanjay and Noor Suri’s son) is indebted to Ashish for helping him through film school. Sanjay and Noor (Ashish’s old friends) are in Ashish’s debt because he helped them with the renovation of their Kensington mansion, which is probably going to go to the authorities once Ashish is tried for his crimes in India. Ryan (Ashish’s stepson) apparently is a druggie, and he thinks that making Gigi (Ryan’s girlfriend) wear his dead mother’s dress in front of Ashish is “funny.” Talking about Gigi, she and Tanveer know each other, and no one else is aware of their association. Once all that is done, Tanveer makes a run for it in Ryan’s car with a briefcase. He totals the car and then mysteriously dies in the jungle. Tanveer turns out to be Tanmay, i.e., a news reporter who was there for the hot scoop on Ashish’s life.
Mira, who has figured out Tanmay and Gigi’s relationship (they were former lovers), consoles Gigi at the dinner table and finds out about the vials of poison that were used to kill Rumi. Well, it was meant for Ashish, but Rumi was the one who ended up drinking it. Rumi’s death stopped Ashish from drinking his champagne. So he wasn’t killed via poisoning. The only person who has something that can be turned into poison is Sanjay because he carries medicine and injections for his potassium deficiency. Therefore, everyone starts to accuse Sanjay of murder. His anxiety is quadrupled by the revelation that Ishaan isn’t actually his son. He is the result of Noor’s affair with Jimmy (which confirms that Jimmy is bisexual). When Sanjay tries to take a break from all this, Mira asks him to let her search his room for Ashish’s missing briefcase, i.e., the one that Tanveer/Tanmay was running away with. Before she can do that, Sanjay traps Mira in the broom closet while trying to open the aforementioned briefcase himself. While he’s in the middle of stabbing the briefcase, he’s stabbed by someone offscreen. Since Noor lets Mira out, she seems to be Sanjay’s killer. However, that’s not the case at all.
‘Neeyat’ Ending Explained: How Does Mira Identify The Killer?
Mira tells Jimmy, Ryan, Gigi, Zara, Noor, Ishaan, Lisa, and Sasha to gather in the library. Firstly, she accuses Jimmy of knocking her out when she was going after Ashish. Moments later, Ashish was found dead. That must mean Jimmy is the killer, right? Wrong. Jimmy admits that he knocked out Mira, but he says that he didn’t kill Ashish. He accuses Ashish of killing Tahira. That’s why he wanted to confront him once (because he loved him and hated him) and make Ashish confess for the sake of closure. But he didn’t get to do that because Ashish was gone before he got to him. Mira turns to Ryan next and accuses him of trying to drop a chandelier on Ashish before the dinner. Ryan confesses that he did do that because he wanted Ashish to confess that he had killed Ryan’s mother. Mira collects Ryan’s scissors as evidence and then shifts her focus to Gigi. Mira says that Gigi is actually a former reporter at the Nation 24 news channel, and, much like Tanmay, she’s there to get a scoop and also help Tanmay get away from the castle with Ashish’s briefcase in Ryan’s car. Gigi admits that she pretended to be in love with Ryan so that she could get the truth out of Ashish because she couldn’t digest the deaths of eight innocent souls.
Noor admits that she did try to poison Ashish because he used to sit on her and Sanjay’s shoulders like a dementor, sucking away any semblance of joy they had in their lives. That said, she didn’t push Ashish to his death. Sasha is guilty of blackmailing Lisa for the tuition money that Ashish wasn’t giving her. Meanwhile, Lisa is guilty of spying on Ashish for the Minister of Industries, Raj Choudhary, because Raj is the one who helped Ashish escape from India after committing fraud and causing the deaths of eight people. But she claims that, while spying on Ashish, she genuinely fell in love with her. Mira makes it clear that Sanjay Suri is Tanmay’s killer because he needed the briefcase, and then Sanjay was killed by Kay. When Mira steps out to look for Kay, Zara renders everyone unconscious and tries to make a run for it with the fabled briefcase to deliver it to Ashish.
Yes, Ashish didn’t fall to his death. He used a trapdoor to get to the bottom of the cliff and pretended to be dead. Then he waited there for Zara to get the briefcase, which would give him a fresh start while he remained dead in the eyes of the law. Kay found out about the trapdoor and realized that Ashish was alive. So, Ashish employed her to get the briefcase, which was when Kay killed Sanjay. However, she was knocked out by Zara on her way out and stuffed in a secret closet in the library room (Kay died there, BTW). When Zara tried to get to Ashish, Mira caught up to her and killed her. When Ashish tries to do the same, Mira “accidentally” kills him, too, while keeping the briefcase for herself. Poetic. At the end of Neeyat, it’s revealed that the Mira Rao we’ve been following all this time isn’t the real Mira Rao. The fake Mira Rao is actually an employee at Ashish’s AK Cyber and Devika Chellam’s girlfriend, i.e., one of the suicide victims. She and Devika Chellam were planning to start a new life, which was when she went bankrupt and took her own life. Since Devika couldn’t make her dream a reality, the fake Mira Rao took it upon himself to be the harbinger of Ashish’s comeuppance. She obviously didn’t expect things to go so wrong. But it is what it is.
What Happens In The Mid-Credits Scene?
Yes, there is a mid-credits scene. Before the credits roll, we see the real Mira Rao vowing to meet the person who not only impersonated her but also vanished into thin air with a briefcase full of cash (from various countries) and a fresh start. The news channel report plays along with the credits to detail everything that can be disclosed publicly about Ashish Kapoor’s “death by suicide.” But if you stay seated a little longer, you’ll be treated to a mid-credits scene where the real Mira Rao catches up to the fake Mira Rao. Shefali Shah’s character (the real Mira Rao) tells Vidya Balan’s character (the fake Mira Rao) that she’s good, but she isn’t as good as the real deal. Balan states that she isn’t as good as her yet, which means that if she continues to sharpen her skills, she’ll be better than Shah. And that’s where Neeyat ends. No, I don’t think that Balan’s character can be arrested by Shah’s character because there is no evidence of her crime. There’s a motive, but it’ll be really difficult to pin Balan’s character as a mastermind. I hope that in a potential yet-to-be-announced sequel to this film, we don’t see Balan’s character working for Shah’s character. Instead, I’d like for them to be each other’s nemesis, forever locked in a cat-and-mouse chase.
