Dev (Irrfan Khan) is a hostage to routine and boredom. He stays late in the office, long after everyone has gone, playing computer games. He messages his wife, Reena (Kirti Kulhari), each day without fail before leaving work. He reaches home only to find his dinner lying cold on a table, and his wife asleep. Dev looks tired and dazed, as if sleepwalking through a tiresome nightmare.One day, encouraged by his friend, he decides to surprise Reena by reaching home early. He finds her in bed with her lover Ranjit (Arunoday Singh). Instead of confronting her, he starts blackmailing her. This, we soon find out, has a domino effect. Soon there are four parties in the equation, each blackmailing the other.Abhinay Deo’s Blackmail, a black comedy drama, has a whimsical premise that suits its genre. But the film contradicts its world early. When Dev reaches his house, he sees his wife through a small hole in the kitchen wall. He sees her lying on the bed and smiles; a romantic number plays in the background. It is evident that Dev isn’t a hardened cynic; he still loves his wife and want to make things work. Yet when he finds out that she’s cheating on her, he doesn’t hesitate before blackmailing her. This may look like a funny plot point, but it’s not how someone like Dev, a regular risk-averse guy, would react.This isn’t a one-off instance. Blackmail is constantly pulled by two different forces – one wants it to be realistic, rooting the story in an everyday milieu populated by ordinary people; the other wants it to be cinematic, floating a world where nothing is out of bounds: blackmail, betrayal, murder. Besides, Deo and screenwriter Parveez Sheikh have so little faith in their material that they suffocate the film with caricatures, walking versions of lame jokes that prod us to laugh.So Dev has a boss (Omi Vaidya) who is no less than a buffoon. He talks in a quasi-American accent, has two American flags and a framed photo of Donald Trump in his office and, as the head of a company that sells toilet papers, asks his colleagues to rub their cheeks against them. (The end credits identify him as “Boss DK”.) Then there’s Dev’s friend, whose sexism is so on the surface and constant that he, too, is not a person but a showcase for gags. Ranjit’s wife (Divya Dutta), a distrustful raging alcoholic, is a similar cue for laughs.What’s worse, plenty of scenes have characters acting for the camera, attempting an ideal comedic response. Blackmail’s writing is so immature, and so hungry for audiences’ validation, that you’re hardly inside the story – the jokes look like inconsequential asides, plot turns another perfunctory effort to impress. Besides, Deo and Sheikh adopt another lazy screenwriting trope – the crutch of coincidence – to propel the story forward. When Dev reaches his house to find Reena with Ranjit, he eavesdrops on their conversation. They’re talking about him. How does your husband look, asks Ranjit. “He looks like a husband,” she says. This scene is supposed to make us empathise with Dev, but we find telling ourselves, “What are the odds?” Similarly, Dev gets Ranjit’s number from Reena’s phone when she’s sleeping. It is difficult to accept that she, someone having an extra marital affair, would keep her phone unlocked.Blackmail continues in a similar vein for the rest of its runtime, where characters disregard each other’s intelligence and transform drastically without self-reflection or hesitation. But you know what the real rub is: It is your intelligence that is getting insulted and it is you who has to accept, even love, everything at face value. At one point, Dev recounts the details of his life – in essence, the film’s story – to an investigating cop. He is taken aback and says, “Which B-grade film’s story you’re telling me?” It’s one of the rare moments that makes you laugh – and it is so because this scene, unlike many others, is at least honest and (unintentionally) self-aware.