The sound design in the first twenty minutes of The Window features a low-frequency hum that seems designed strictly to irritate anyone sitting in the fourth row of a suburban multiplex, right on the threshold of human hearing where you cannot quite decide if it is coming from the screen or a dying transformer behind the exit sign. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every time the camera cut back to the living room set, which smells faintly of fresh plywood and second-hand upholstery even through a digital DCP.

Directorially, the film operates on the assumption that if you point a long lens at someone's earlobe for nine seconds longer than feels polite, the audience will automatically supply their own psychological depth. Sometimes this actually works, mostly because Atul Hanwat has the kind of face that looks like it has spent too much time reading gas bills in the rain, staring past the middle distance with a flat, unblinking fatigue that feels entirely unstyled. He does not give us the usual heroic arc we have come to expect from lead actors in contemporary hindi films, choosing instead to lean into a dull, repetitive sullenness that makes you want to check your watch just to see how much daylight is left.

Praveen Maheswari enters the frame about forty minutes in as the brother-in-law with an unpaid debt and a nervous tic in his left thumb, playing the role with a greasy charm that reminds me of Irrfan Khan in the early television days before the international prestige budgets started smoothing out the rough edges. He occupies the corners of the room in a way that forces the camera to adjust its weight, slouching against doorframes and chewing on toothpicks that he probably brought from home. There is a scene near the water tank where he delivers a five-minute monologue about a broken water pump, and if I'm honest, it is the only part of the script that feels like it was written by someone who has ever actually spoken to another human being without a camera running.

Sayoni Mishra gets saddled with the thankless task of looking concerned while standing by various windows, which is perhaps on the nose given the title, but she manages to inject a sharp, vinegar sort of annoyance into her pauses that prevents the proceedings from sliding entirely into the sort of prestige boredom that usually wins awards at regional festivals where the coffee is free and lukewarm. The screenplay by debut writer Vikramjit Singh relies too heavily on people not answering questions directly, a trick borrowed straight from middle-period arthouse imports that stopped working around the time digital cameras made coverage cheap enough to waste.

The cinematography by Akash Deep uses a muddy, desaturated palette that makes every wall look like it was painted with wet cement during a power outage. It feels less like a deliberate aesthetic choice and more like the colourist got sick on a Tuesday and nobody bothered to check the grades before sending the hard drives to the lab, though the occasional shaft of yellow afternoon light hitting a dusty coffee mug almost rescues the aesthetic inertia of the middle act. Meanwhile, the score by an uncredited trio of electronic musicians consists mostly of three notes played on a cello with too much rosin, repeating over and over until you start wondering if the theater sound system is about to catch fire.

We are told through various radio broadcasts playing faintly in the background that the city outside is changing, that old mills are being torn down to make way for glass-fronted offices where young people drink cold brew and talk about equity, but none of this macro-level social commentary ever quite connects to the domestic squabbles happening in front of the peeling floral wallpaper. Bollywood movies often struggle to bridge the gap between systemic municipal rot and individual marital discord, and this picture falls into that exact trap, preferring to show Hanwat staring at a damp ceiling rather than dealing with the actual economic pressures that put him in this three-room flat to begin with.

There is a recurring motif involving a stray dog with a limp that wanders past the courtyard every time a major plot point is about to be resolved, and it is honestly just a bit much, the kind of heavy-handed framing that makes you long for the honest crassness of mainstream hindi cinema where people at least have the decency to get slapped in the face by a villain with an eye patch. When the dog shows up for the fourth time during an emotionally charged argument over an insurance policy, someone three rows behind me actually groaned out loud.

Not great, not bad, just there. The film plods along its predetermined tracks without ever really earning the right to be as slow as it is, testing the audience's patience simply because it has eighty million rupees of state-backed funding to burn and nothing particular to say about the municipal water supply. Hanwat is solid enough to keep you from walking out before the credits, but the whole enterprise leaves the distinct impression of someone reading an old grocery list in an empty garage.