Badla Ending Explained: Who Was the Fake Badal Gupta?

Spoiler warning: this page gives away the twists and ending of Badla (2019, directed by Sujoy Ghosh, with Amitabh Bachchan, Taapsee Pannu and Amrita Singh).

The short answer

The “Badal Gupta” who spends the night questioning Naina Sethi is not Badal Gupta. He is Nirmal, the father of a young man, Sunny, whom Naina killed in a car accident and then left to die in the boot of his own car. Nirmal and his wife Rani spent months working out the truth and arranged the whole evening to make Naina confess, with a voice recorder hidden in the fake lawyer’s pen.

At the end the real Badal Gupta turns up at Naina’s door, she takes the pen apart, finds the recorder, sees Nirmal across the street with Rani, and Rani calls the police. Naina is arrested, this time on her own words.

The set-up

Naina is a successful businesswoman in London, arrested for the murder of her lover Arjun. She is out on bail. Her lawyer, Jimmy Punjabi, brings in the famous defence attorney “Badal Gupta” to help for one evening. Badal tells her there is a witness who will testify against her.

Naina’s story is this: she and Arjun were blackmailed over their affair, were summoned to a hotel, she was attacked, and when she woke up Arjun was dead along with the blackmail money. The police found no sign of anyone else being in the room.

The conversation, in order

1. The first lie. Badal pushes Naina about the disappearance of a young man near the hotel. She finally admits that months earlier, driving back from a cabin in the woods, she and Arjun had accidentally hit another car and killed a young man, Sunny.
2. The cover-up. Arjun persuaded her not to report it, arguing that Sunny had been texting and was not wearing a seat belt. They put the body in the boot of Sunny’s car, and Naina dumped it in a swamp.
3. The couple. While Arjun waited in her car, an elderly couple, Rani and Nirmal, offered to fix it at their home. In the house Arjun saw a photograph of Sunny and realised he was their son. Rani heard Sunny’s phone ring in Arjun’s pocket and grew suspicious. When Arjun adjusted the driver’s seat of the repaired car, it made things worse. Naina and Arjun got rid of the car at a scrapyard and reported it stolen.
4. The frame. Naina saw news reports accusing Sunny of embezzling money from the bank where he worked. Arjun had taken Sunny’s wallet and used his wife’s credentials to hack the bank and frame him.
5. Rani’s pursuit. From the number plate, Rani identified Naina’s car. Jimmy faked an alibi, and the police accepted it, but Rani did not. She confronted Naina at an event where Naina was named Businesswoman of the Year and begged her to say where Sunny was. Naina kept lying.
6. The blackmail. Months later Naina and Arjun were contacted by a blackmailer, leading to the hotel night and Arjun’s death.

The turn: Badal tests her

1. Badal suggests Rani killed Arjun with help from Nirmal, who worked at the hotel. Naina admits she saw Rani in the room, and that she had lied earlier to test Badal.
2. Badal reveals there was no witness: he invented it to get the truth out of her.
3. He asks for the location of the swamp where Sunny’s car lies, saying he could place something belonging to Arjun there to make Naina look innocent. Trusting him now, Naina tells the darkest part: Sunny was still alive in the boot when she dumped the car, and she chose to let him die.
4. Badal says it sounds as if Naina, not Arjun, ran the cover-up. He suggests that Arjun, overcome with guilt, went to the hotel to confess to Rani and Nirmal and Naina killed him to keep him quiet. Naina denies it.
5. Badal refuses to represent her any more unless she admits killing Arjun. She does.

The final reveal

Badal steps out to call his wife about working late. Naina’s phone call from Jimmy cuts out whenever the pen is nearby, and she realises something is wrong. The real Badal Gupta arrives at her door. She unscrews the pen and finds a hidden recorder with her confession.

Looking out of the window, she sees the man who posed as Badal in the apartment opposite with Rani. He takes off his disguise: it is Nirmal, Sunny’s father. With the recording as solid proof, Rani calls the police.

What really happened

According to the film’s final logic, Naina did kill Sunny by leaving him to die, and she did, as the confession says, kill Arjun to stop him confessing. Rani and Nirmal built the whole evening, including a faked lawyer, a made-up witness and a confession-trap, because no court was going to give them the truth.

The title word “badla” means revenge. It is the parents’ revenge, but it works through patience and trickery rather than violence.

Clues that point to the trick

• The “lawyer” is quick to push for admissions of guilt, not for ways to get her off.
• He is obsessive about the swamp’s location and about the theory that Naina did it, steering her to confess.
• The pen jams her phone signal. It is a recorder, not a pen.
• Naina’s own lawyer, Jimmy, is the one who brought “Badal” in, so she had no reason to check who he was.

Questions people keep asking

Did Naina really kill Arjun?

She says she did, but the film leaves open how far to trust any confession in a film where every one was staged.

Who was the blackmailer?

The film strongly implies it was Rani and Nirmal, who had been hunting for Naina since Sunny vanished, and Nirmal worked at the hotel where the summons took place. The plot summary we rely on does not spell out every step of how they staged it, so we are not going to guess further.

Is Badla a remake?

It is an official remake of the 2016 Spanish thriller Contratiempo (The Invisible Guest), relocated to London and Glasgow, where shooting began on 14 June 2018.

Where can I watch it?

It was released on 8 March 2019, International Women’s Day, and is listed on Netflix. It runs 118 minutes.

See the Badla film page for ratings and reviews.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Badla (2019 film)