Manoj Bajpayee is the happiest when he has a sharply written script in hand. He was deeply impressed with writer-director Rensil D’Silva’s vision of Dial 100, a taut thriller. Noting that psychological thrillers are hard to come by, he says, “We don’t have well-written psychological thrillers here because we don’t encourage good writers. What I like about the genre is that it is not dependent on the background score or editing; it’s the mind games that make the audience edgy.”

The ZEE5 film revolves around Bajpayee’s cop character who receives a mysterious call at the police control room from Seema Pallav, essayed by Neena Gupta, threatening to settle old scores with him. With the cat-and-mouse game spanning over a night, he agrees that it brought back memories of Ram Gopal Varma’s slick mystery thriller he had fronted. “It reminded me of Kaun [1999]. Both films play out over one night. That said, the two are completely different. Kaun was a psychological thriller while I would term Dial 100 an emotional thriller. It addresses certain teenage issues that need to be discussed in cinema.”