There is a specific kind of sweat that clings to the actors in Bugis Street, and I kept looking for it on Arjun Rampal’s collar while he paces across the courtroom floor in Nail Polish. It never shows up, which is a small mercy for the makeup department, but it leaves you acutely aware of the studio air conditioning humming just outside the frame. Hindi movies have a terrible time with the texture of bureaucracy, tending to coat every table in either mahogany dust or hyper-modern glass glare, and director Bugs Bhargava Krishna falls right into that polished trap during the opening twenty minutes. You get these sweeping, meaningless crane shots of the High Court exterior that look less like a real place where people argue over property deeds and murder charges and more like an animated architectural rendering meant to impress a board of directors. Then the script just drops you into the middle of a prosecution argument about dead migrant workers without giving anyone a moment to breathe or check their watch, and if I'm honest, it took me a solid half-hour to figure out which lawyer represented who.

The plot itself revolves around Veer Singh, played by Manav Kaul with a slippery, quiet stillness that keeps you guessing whether he is a monster or a victim of severe state-sponsored framing, who stands accused of the brutal murder and abduction of several children in a sleepy industrial town. Anand Tiwari plays the defense counsel who is drowning in his own nervous ticks, sweating through his cheap off-the-rack suits while trying to keep his client from smiling at the wrong moments in front of the judge. Rampal enters the scene as the public prosecutor who carries himself like a man who spends three hours every morning lifting heavy things in a private gym, wearing his custom-tailored suits with a casual menace that almost makes you forget he spent the first decade of his career reading lines like they were written on the back of a cereal box. The courtroom drama moves back and forth with reasonable speed until it hits the dissociative identity disorder angle, which is where things get genuinely slippery.

Manav Kaul does something remarkable with his hands in the second half, twisting them into these tight, claw-like shapes whenever the persona shifts from a macho military veteran to a terrified, whispering woman named Charu. It avoids all the loud, theatrical mugging that usually sinks this kind of material in Bollywood movies, keeping the transformation contained to the flicker of an eyelash and the tightening of a throat muscle. You can trace a direct line from how Manoj Bajpayee held his body in 1971 straight to what Kaul achieves here, trading grand gestures for micro-expressions that make the judge’s bench look entirely inadequate for the psychological weight sitting in front of it. Yet the camera insists on framing him with these heavy, purple-tinted shadows that feel like they were bought on sale from a noir starter pack, completely undermining the subtle dread of his performance by announcing every mood change three seconds before it actually happens on screen.

There is a recurring needle-drop during the flashback sequences—some low-frequency synth groan that sounds like an electric fence humming in an empty field—that plays at least six times too many. It hits every time Veer looks at a mirror or touches his own hair, turning a genuinely unsettling psychological crack into a recurring commercial break gag. The cinematography by Chirantan Das tries to make every interrogation room look like a Renaissance painting through smoke machines and aggressive sidelighting, but it just ends up looking muddy and orange, losing the clinical coldness that a murder trial in a provincial Indian town ought to possess. When the script tries to address the deeper trauma behind the murders, it uses dialogue that sounds like it was translated twice through Google from an American textbook on trauma theory, flattening out the local specificity that made the first act work.

Hindi cinema has always struggled to talk about gender identity and male violence without resorting to either broad caricature or preachy moralizing, and Nail Polish stumbles into both traps before the credits roll. The film wants to be an intellectual puzzle about the unreliability of memory and the brutality of the Indian penal system, but it keeps getting distracted by its own cleverness, layering twist upon twist until the legal logic collapses into pure nonsense. You have to wonder how anyone thought a defense strategy involving repressed trauma could bypass basic forensic evidence in a murder trial, but then again, logic is rarely the point when a director wants to spring a surprise on an unsuspecting audience. Rajit Kapur shows up as a judge who looks perpetually disappointed in the entire species, delivering his lines with a weary deadpan that saves several scenes from drowning in melodrama.

Arjun Rampal’s character undergoes a mid-film shift that makes almost no sense on a psychological level, suddenly developing a deep, protective empathy for the man he was trying to send to the gallows two days prior, anchored only by a single scene where they share a cigarette behind a concrete pillar. It is a weak pivot that the film tries to gloss over with rapid-fire editing and some swelling orchestral strings that belong in a completely different movie about superheroes. You leave the theater or turn off the screen thinking about Kaul’s jawline and the way his voice drops an octave when he speaks Hindi with that specific regional cadence, which stays with you long after the courtroom arguments and the silly medical explanations have dissolved into noise.