Filmmakers duo Abbas-Mustan are all geared up to make their web debut with their next directorial, Penthouse. The Netflix film stars Bobby Deol, Arjun Rampal, and Sharman Joshi in the lead while Mouni Roy, Manjari Fadnis, and Waluscha De Sousa play the female leads, as Peepingmoon.com exclusively revealed last year. Now, we have learned that the film which went on floors in November and was wrapped up a couple of weeks back is not an original offering but rather the recreation of a popular foreign film.
Sources close to the development have informed us that Netflix's Penthouse is the official remake of the 2014 Belgian film, The Loft, directed by Erik Van Looy. The erotic thriller revolves around five married men who share ownership of a penthouse loft in the city which they use to secretly meet their respective mistresses. But the fantasy becomes a nightmare when they discover the dead body of a woman in the loft. The men begin to suspect each other of having committed the gruesome crime as they are the only ones with keys to the premises. The murder mystery is unravelled through flashbacks which are intervened with scenes from the present. Interestingly, The Loft is itself a remake of a 2008 Dutch-language film by the same director.
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"The theme of The Loft is universal. Swinging-dick businessmen cheating on their wives translates to any culture. Abbas-Mustan has adapted the Belgium film to the Indian context with a slight change in the plot twist to keep the mystery intact even for those who have seen the original. It has been made as a typical Abbas-Mustan entertainer that keeps the audiences in the dark until the very end. The film is now in the post-production stage and will premiere on Netflix towards mid-this year," the source told us.
Promised to be a slick and stylish whodunit, Penthouse marks Abbas-Mustan's comeback to direction four years after the unsuccessful Machine (2017) that launched Abbas' son Mustafa Burmawala to the showbiz. The film is also keenly awaited in the trade as it reunites the director brothers with Bobby Deol 14 years after their back-to-back hits like Soldier, Ajnabee, Humraaz, and Naqaab!
