Jaane Jaan Ending Explained: How Did Naren Help Maya Cover Up the Murder? Was He Able to Mislead Karan?

Jaane Jaan Ending Explained: Kareena Kapoor Khan’s OTT film debut has been both a miss and a hit depending on how you adjust to its captivating storyline’s execution in the new thriller mystery Sujoy Ghosh directorial. Releasing on September 21, 2023, which is also Khan’s birthday, the Hindi Netflix movie also stars Jaideep Ahlawat as the Maths teacher Naren and Vijay Varma as the suave police inspector Karan. Ghosh’s screenplay is based on the highly acclaimed Japanese novel The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino, and the crime thriller movie is set in Kalimpong.

The movie follows the struggle of a single mother to cover up the murder of her estranged husband, but things are not as black or white as they may seem to be. Helping her through this arduous development is her neighbour, also an esoteric Maths genius, as a young persistent cop joins in on the investigation, posing a threat to both of the other two characters’ fates.

Jaane Jaan Movie Ending Explained Contains Spoilers

What makes the plot even more complex is the fact that Ahlawat’s Naren, Kareena’s Maya and Varma’s Karan are all entangled in the mess together. Naren isn’t just Maya’s helping neighbour, but he’s also a longtime friend of Karan on top of that.

And Karan is the same person who’s first assigned the case to find Ajit’s whereabouts, who’s an ex-cop now involved in some shady business, and his fate’s thread ties up with Maya as he’s her abusive ex-husband who’s still tailing her and making her life a living hell. Within the few initial moments of the movie itself, the plot picks up pace following Ajit’s murder in the heat of the moment.

As he relentlessly threatens Maya (formerly known as Soniya, a bar dancer who ended up on a dark path of life due to her husband’s choices for her) about taking her daughter Tara away and subjecting her to a similar life in the lewd settings of the same bar. Maya sees no light at the end of the tunnel and in a struggle to protect her daughter, she ends up suffocating Ajit (played by Saurabh Sachdeva) to death, while her daughter too assists in the job by locking his hands down as a means to prevent him from escaping.

Jaane Jaan Ending Explained

Throughout the course of the movie, Naren tries his best to keep Maya and her daughter away from danger or from being implicated for Ajit’s murder. He overturns the facts of the whole situation to completely flip over the narrative from going against to her to rather being in her favour. When Karan joins the investigation in search of Ajit, a dead body is discovered, but its severely burnt down, leaving no trace for the police to identify the victim.

The police starts linking this man to Ajit, all thanks to Naren’s perfectly concocted plan. Initially, it appears as if Naren has purposely left behind some clues for the police to link Ajit’s death with Maya, but in the end, when all comes clean, we realise that the dead body discovered by the police was never supposed to be a charred image of Ajit’s remains.

Naren had instead enlisted the help of another homeless man with similar physical attributes and height as that of Ajit. And though, he the greyness of his character is revealed, this move ultimately helps him clear up Maya’s name as it gives them enough room and time to gather new evidence in favour of Maya’s innocence. Being the Maths genius he was, Naren puts the equation together and understands that since Ajit was originally murdered on May 9, all answers and proofs would obviously be against Maya’s statements.

Therefore, he re-stages the act of murder on the aforementioned homeless man to distract the police’s attention for Ajit’s actual dead body that is presumably disposed off elsewhere while the police is busy solving the murder at a different time. For them, the murder happened on May 10 instead, and so this additional one day helps Maya corroborate her lies by constructing a new timeline altogether as per Naren’s suggestion.

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She claims that on the 10th day of the month, she had gone out to watch a children’s movie with Tara, following her daughter’s exam. After which, they went out for lunch and continued their evening escapades by having fun at the karaoke bar, and for each of these places, Karan’s investigation also proves their presence at the said venues.

But that was all possible only because the murder had originally happened on the 9th, after which Naren stepped in to help Maya, thus constructing this alternate scenario which he eventually fed to Karan in his ultimate confession, making himself out to be the bad guy and pretending that he was a mad man who’d assumed himself to be in a secret relationship with Maya which is why he also considered himself to be her bodyguard and killed Ajit.

How did Naren make up a new murder scene altogether?

By roping in a homeless man, he pretended to offer him an abode, i.e. the hotel room Ajit was staying in. He offered him Ajit’s coat in the cold to further accord him with his look and then as he combed his hair at the lodge, one of his strands got left behind in the same comb which later Karan picked up for DNA testing.

After killing this man in the deserted alley, Naren destroyed his face by lynching heavy stones at him and then burnt him. Thereafter, he removed his coat and left one side of it unburnt, thereby leaving behind the homeless man’s traces of blood. This too was picked up by Karan later, and of course the DNA from the blood on the coat and the hair strand matched because they belonged to this stranger.

However, since Naren also left behind Ajit’s half-burnt ID card beside the other torched paraphernalia, Karan put two and two together, and got easily misled into believing that these DNA traces were that of Ajit. As far as he was concerned, the other homeless guy never existed, let alone included in the same equation as the original murder case.

Why did Naren help Maya?

At first, it seems that Naren may have fallen for Maya, but in the end, when she reached out to him in prison to ask why he’d made the sacrifice for her, he opens up about how she’d saved her life when she first moved into the next door flat.

He’d just solved one of the trickiest maths problems, that took him years to do so, but he found out that someone else had already broken his record merely few hours before he turned up with the solution. Everything seemed hopeless to him so decided to end his life in a suicide attempt at his apartment, and as he was about to hang himself, Maya had knocked on his door asking for help with something since she’d just moved in.

He added that this was his way of returning the favour for having saved his life without realising. Moreover, after this incident, Naren gathered the courage to reconnect with his first love – Maths – again, and never looked back.

Earlier when Karan also visited his place, we see a number of hefty binder with numbers marked on them, referring to the number of years it would take him to solve the respective question. After his confession, Naren is sentenced to 25 years in jail, and he takes this long period of time to work on those questions without any distraction in his way, and ultimately succeeds in solving one of them too.

The Suspect X Hindi movie adaptation, Jaane Jaan, is now streaming on Netflix. Read our review of the latest Sujoy Ghosh directorial below.

Also read: Jaane Jaan Review: Jaideep Ahlawat Soars as the Silent Winner in This Mediocre Sujoy Ghosh Thriller Comeback