Irrfan Khan playing a weary cop who drinks too much chai from a chipped glass that looks like it came from the prop room of a completely different production is the single best reason to sit through the first forty minutes of Jennifer Lynch's Hisss, which is not great, not bad, just there. Mallika Sherawat wears green contact lenses that catch the studio lights in a way that makes her look less like a mythical shape-shifting serpent and more like she just walked out of a particularly humid night shoot in Film City with a mild corneal irritation. Hindi films have spent decades trying to wrestle the ancient nagi mythology into something modern without looking like a glorified episode of a Doordarshan afternoon serial, and frankly, nobody involved in this particular endeavor cracked the code. The screenplay lurches from ancient curses to contemporary bio-piracy with the grace of a tractor pulling a stalled bullock cart uphill in the middle of the monsoon. You can practically hear the pages turning as characters stop whatever they are doing to explain expositional backstory directly into the camera lens with deadpan earnestness. The narrative structure feels less like a built thing and more like a collection of scenes dropped onto a editing bay floor and taped back together in a sequence that barely holds water. Lynch tries for this weird cross-cultural tone where American indie grit rubs shoulders with high-gloss Bombay melodrama, and the friction between those two sensibilities generates more smoke than heat.

Sherawat deserves some credit for physical commitment even when the CGI snakes look like discarded licorice ropes animated by an intern working on a cracked laptop at four in the morning. She crawls through mud, contorts her limbs into impossible angles, and hisses at various character actors with an intensity that suggests she was genuinely pissed off about her trailer conditions on the day. But the direction lets her down by shooting her transformation sequences in such tight, frenetic close-ups that you lose all sense of spatial geography, leaving the viewer to piece together what body part is turning into what scale through sheer guesswork. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me how the sound design defaults to the exact same wet squelch every single time a foot hits the dirt, as if the foley artist gave up around lunchtime and hit loop. Divya Dutta shows up as the suffering, neglected wife of Irrfan’s corrupt American-funded scientist foil, and she plays her two scenes with a level of quiet desperation that belongs in a totally different movie—something by Shyam Benegal maybe, where people actually have inner lives instead of just reacting to computer-generated reptiles chewing on local extras. Irrfan, bless him, treats lines about snake pearls and immortal vengeance with the exact same weary, world-weary gravel he brought to The Namesake, dragging every single scene he is in up out of the swamp by its collar.

The cinematography by Amalendu Chaudhary tries desperately to give the proceedings some visual weight by drowning every interior in sickly yellow light and pumping artificial fog into forests that are supposed to be deep in the Western Ghats but clearly smell of municipal drainage. There is an overreliance on Dutch angles during conversations about corporate greed that feels like it was lifted straight from a nineties straight-to-video action thriller starring Mithun Chakraborty, which might have been a deliberate homage if the rest of the film didn't take itself with such grim, humorless solemnity. Whenever the score kicks in—a heavy-handed mix of chanting and distorted electric guitars—you brace yourself for another slow-motion foot chase through the brush that goes on for at least three minutes longer than any human narrative reason could possibly justify. The editing cuts away from dramatic confrontations right before they get interesting, opting instead for lingering reaction shots of extras looking mildly concerned while a rubber head bobs in the foreground of the frame. It is weirdly fascinating to watch a movie stumble this consistently over basic mechanical hurdles, like watching someone try to assemble an IKEA wardrobe using only a butter knife and sheer stubbornness.

Beneath the genre machinery and the rubber prosthetics, Hisss is clumsily wrestling with ideas about colonial exploitation, the commodification of indigenous folklore, and the destruction of rural ecosystems by men in crisp linen shirts who smell like expensive cologne. Yet these themes keep getting interrupted by scenes of Sherawat biting the heads off poachers with the enthusiastic abandon of a teenager eating a messy burger in the back seat of a hatchback. The film wants to be an eco-fable about Mother Nature fighting back against the patriarchal tech-bros who want to bottle her bodily fluids for profit, but it frames that struggle through a male gaze so relentless and sweaty that any political point gets thoroughly lost in the swamp water. Bollywood movies have a long and storied history of treating mythological figures with either absolute reverence or absolute trashy camp, and this movie falls into a grey zone where it is neither fun enough to be trash nor smart enough to be subversive. You find yourself zoning out during the dialogue-heavy stretches in air-conditioned laboratories and waking up only when Irrfan lights another bidi and looks at a computer screen with profound disappointment.

There is no grand revelation waiting at the end of the narrative arc, no thematic payoff that justifies the two hours spent watching people yell at each other in poorly lit rooms while digital scales float around their heads. The finale is just a chaotic blur of explosions, stunt doubles crashing through wooden furniture, and green-screen composites that look like they were rendered during a power outage in a suburban basement. Irrfan gives his final monologue while bleeding from a wound that looks suspiciously like raspberry jam, and you can see him mentally calculating how many days of dubbing he has left before he can cash the check and move on to something that doesn't require him to interact with animatronic reptiles. Hisss ends not with a bang or a poignant thematic summary, but with a lingering shot of an empty road in the rain that goes on for ten seconds too long before cutting abruptly to black without a proper fade.