Monika Panwar spits out a grain of rice in the first fifteen minutes of Dukaan and it's honestly the most real thing any actor has done in a mainstream Hindi movie all year. You sit there in the dark watching these surrogate mothers live in their government-mandated dormitories with their matching pastel dupattas and institutional linoleum, waiting for the melodrama to drop an anvil on your head, but then she just does that. Small, ungllamorous, irritated. She is playing Jasmine, or rather she is playing a woman whose real name stopped mattering the moment the clinic lawyers handed her a stack of stamp papers and told her where to sign. Siddharth and Garima direct this thing with the kind of blunt-force earnestness that usually belongs in a morning soap opera, which makes it all the more surprising when the camera simply refuses to move away from Panwar’s face during the quiet stretches where nobody is yelling about money or biology.

If I'm honest, the first half hour moves like molasses through a funnel because the screenplay can't decide if it wants to be a hard-hitting expose on the reproductive outsourcing hubs of rural Gujarat or just a weepy melodrama about a woman missing her own milk. The directors wrote the script themselves and sometimes it shows in how aggressively they underline the emotions, pasting heavy-handed dialogue over scenes that were already working purely through the actors' body language. There's a supporting character, a local doctor played with a perpetual scowl by Vrajesh Hirjee, who seems to have wandered in from an entirely different movie shot twenty years ago on a Mumbai backlot. Every time he opens his mouth to explain the economics of surrogacy to the audience for the fourth time, you can feel the air leave the room. Yet right when you're ready to check your watch, Insane Ashraf shows up as the bewildered husband who doesn't know whether to love his wife or the fifty thousand rupees sitting in her post office account, and the dynamic shifts into something prickly and uncomfortable.

Panwar anchors the whole enterprise with a performance that reminds you of what Geetanjali Thapa was doing in Liar's Dice before everyone forgot about that film. She doesn't give you the big, tear-streaked monologues that Hindi films usually demand from women playing suffering mothers; instead, she communicates everything through a tightening of her jaw or the way she aggressively scrubs a stain off a plastic bucket. Sikandar Kher pops up later as the wealthy intended father from the city, wearing linen shirts that cost more than the clinic's entire diagnostic wing, and he plays the part with a flat, transactional exhaustion that fits the material surprisingly well. He doesn't try to make the character likable, which saves everyone a lot of trouble. He’s just a guy buying a product, except the product happens to be a newborn infant crying in a crib while Monali Thakur’s score swells up to tell you how you're supposed to feel about the miracle of modern science.

Speaking of the score, that one recurring cello motif plays at least six times too many during the second act. It’s a minor mechanical gripe, sure, but it gets grating when the editing cuts to a close-up of a ceiling fan just as the music hits its emotional peak, lingering for three full seconds longer than necessary as if daring you to look away. The cinematography by whatever unfortunate soul had to light those windowless dormitory sets relies too heavily on a sickly, sodium-vapor yellow that makes everyone look like they have hepatitis, though it does capture the sticky, oppressive heat of a place where nobody wants to be. The framing gets lazy during the courtroom sequences, reverting to standard shot-reverse-shot coverage that feels utterly disconnected from the jagged, unpredictable energy Panwar brings to her scenes. Still, there’s an ugly, raw honesty to the way the village background actors stare directly into the camera lens with undisguised boredom, reminding you that real life in these transactional hubs isn't a tragedy to them at all, just another Tuesday afternoon.

The script wants to talk about bodily autonomy and the commodification of the womb, but it keeps getting distracted by melodramatic subplots involving estranged brothers and blackmailing clinic brokers. Bollywood movies have always struggled to tackle systemic exploitation without wrapping it in a neat, palatable package where the bad guys learn their lesson and the victims get a tearful reunion at a railway station. Dukaan tries hard to avoid that specific trap, keeping the ending messy and unresolved in a way that will probably alienate audiences looking for a clean moral takeaway. When Jasmine finally walks out of that house, she doesn't look empowered or broken. She just looks tired, her shoulders slumped under the weight of a heavy shawl and a future she never agreed to buy into, and the screen fades to black right there in the middle of a dusty Gujarat street with a stray dog barking in the distance.