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The second assistant director, Priya Sahai, had just refilled her thermos with coffee from the grimy backstage kiosk when she heard the yells. “Cut! Cut! Manav! Wake him up — what kind of method acting is this?” someone joked, followed by a beat of silence.
She rushed onto the darkened set built in an abandoned textile mill near Jogeshwari: a makeshift slum façade for the climactic scene of “The City Doesn’t Sleep” — a noir indie thriller debuting at international festivals soon. Manav Shetty, the charming but difficult sound designer, was found slumped behind the fake corrugated wall, motionless. No blood. No visible injury. Dead.
Director Tanay Verma ran fingers through his dyed silver hair and muttered, “Don’t film this. Just… don’t. Priya, lock this down. Make sure no one posts anything.”
The entire unit was kept in the mill through the night. Priya noticed subtle tells: cinematographer Neela avoiding Manav’s body, producer Alia texting frantically, and the young gaffer, Rahul, pacing oddly near the equipment van.
Police logs later said Manav died of acute potassium chloride poisoning, through an injection mark found under his elbow. None of the medical props included syringes — the script had no scenes like that. And yet, there it was.
The next morning, Priya checked the film logs. The last shot rolled 40 minutes before Manav’s death. Convenient gap. But what nagged her was something else — the off-screen voice Manav had been capturing obsessively for a side project called “The Sounds Between Takes.” His laptop, missing from his work desk, mysteriously turned up in the AC van the following evening, wiped clean.
“He said the dead air between takes told him who people really were,” she recalled to herself.
Priya repeated playing the raw boom mic footage from earlier scenes, using backups she fetched from cloud syncs. One particular ambient take, recorded two nights earlier during a lighting delay, caught her attention.
A partial whisper: “…he’s going to expose you in Berlin. You better fix it before he speaks.”
She ran a spectral match of the voice using a mobile app. The results tilted dangerously toward producer Alia. Priya knew Alia had lied to the team, claiming she and Manav barely spoke. In truth, they’d co-founded an audio tech startup last year — a paper trail hidden behind shell firms.
Why would Manav die now, mid-shoot, before the film premiered?
Priya started scanning deleted clips from the backup SD cards. Manav had hidden a micro-diary in the slate logs: mislabelled as bloopers. In one, he recorded Alia shouting on a call: “Manav has the files — Neela transferred without consent. If this leaks, we lose Cannes. Override him.”
The footage, when slowed, clearly showed Neela slipping a syringe behind her belt as she passed the fake wall just minutes before the fatal yell.
The truth finally aligned: Neela — the film’s brilliant yet underpaid cinematographer — had created a dynamic VFX LUT process she was undercredited for. Alia had promised her backend profits and international exposure. Weeks before Cannes, Manav had discovered that Neela’s proprietary film look had been integrating copyrighted AI modules scraped illegally. He threatened to report it.
Alia had demanded Neela handle him quietly.
But Neela didn’t poison him.
Another offhand clip — a tail audio during a take reset — caught Tanay venting: “I let that arrogant sound guy sabotage my shoot one more time, I’ll erase him from post.”
The missing laptop — found in Tanay’s van. Wiped.
So who actually injected Manav?
Priya did what Manav always said: listen between takes. In an unused take, the clapperboard got clicked, but no “action” yelled. Priya zoomed into the background.
Rahul, the gaffer, quietly passes Manav a Vitamin C vial — they often swapped supplements. But this time, the amber vial bore a sticker — peeled halfway, revealing medical supply branding. It was potassium chloride, relabelled.
Rahul.
Priya confronted him during the final shoot wrap dinner. She casually brought up smart drug mods. Rahul laughed nervously. “Who’d inject vitamins without Googling the label? Manav trusted junk too easily.”
She hadn’t mentioned an injection. Only he did.
Rahul broke down before dessert.
He was in love with Neela. He’d overheard her meltdown after Manav threatened to expose her. Thought he was protecting her. Used her gym syringes from her van.
Alia covered for them all. All she cared about was the film. The reel had to roll. Cannes was weeks away.
In the end, Rahul walked into the police station voluntarily.
Neela left the country.
The film premiered without crediting sound design.
And Priya made a podcast from Manav’s recovered recordings.
She titled it: “Extras Between Takes.”
It charted globally.
