Ram Kapoor's shirt collars in Neeyat are about an inch too wide for his neck, which is a small thing to fixate on during a murder mystery, yet I spent half the first act staring at them while people yelled in accents that sounded rented. If I'm honest, the whole aesthetic of the production feels like it was put together by someone who watched Knives Out once on a cracked laptop screen and decided they could replicate the Scottish Highlands using a damp estate in the UK and some very aggressive color grading. You get these massive drone shots of cliffs that are supposed to look brooding, but mostly they just remind you how cold everyone must have been between takes. It is the kind of mid-budget luxury product that Bollywood churns out when they want to pretend they are making international content for streaming platforms without actually changing the foundational beats of a formula that worked fine in the nineties. Hindi films used to hide their budget constraints behind grand emotional chaos, whereas now they hide them inside fog machines and dim lighting.

Vidya Balan walks into this Scottish castle playing Mira Rao, a CBI officer who looks perpetually exhausted by the sheer stupidity of the wealthy people she has to interrogate. She wears sensible coats and drinks tea with a grimace that suggests she would rather be anywhere else, which matches how I felt sitting through the exposition dump that takes up roughly forty percent of the runtime. Balan has this wonderful trick where she doesn't actually give you any extra information with her eyes; she just lets you sit in the silence she creates, which is annoying for an ensemble mystery because she constantly steals focus from the people who are actually talking. When she squares off against Rahul Bose, who plays a disgraced billionaire with the frantic energy of a terrier trapped in a wet paper bag, the movie briefly snaps into something sharper than your average Friday night release. Bose is doing a lot of physical business with his hands, touching his lapels, rubbing his forehead, pacing across Turkish rugs like he is auditioning to play a Shakespearean villain in a regional theatre. It is not great, not bad, just there.

Director Anu Menon seems determined to keep every single suspect looking equally guilty, which unfortunately means they all have to act with the subtlety of a foghorn. Every single person in that dining room has a secret involving offshore accounts, shady wire transfers, or complicated blackmail schemes that require an accounting degree to follow properly. The screenplay, credited to a committee of writers including Menon and Priya Venkataraman, treats the audience like we are taking a difficult high school math test we forgot to study for. They throw names of shell companies at you while the camera tracks across silver cutlery, hoping that sheer speed will disguise the fact that nobody's motive makes any logical sense once you stop to think about it for five seconds. It lacks the grease-painted fun of something like Ittefaq, where the contrivances were at least deployed with enough swagger to keep you from asking questions about the timeline of the murder.

The soundtrack by Mikey McCleary mostly consists of low-frequency cello drones that kick in whenever someone looks suspiciously at a fireplace, which happens about every four minutes. It gets exhausting very quickly, this reliance on bass drops to manufacture tension where the dialogue fails to provide any actual meat. The cinematography by Andreas Neo loves a good Dutch angle, tilting the horizon whenever characters start arguing about who stole five million pounds from a Swiss vault, as if the camera itself is dizzy from the sheer volume of exposition being hurled at the walls. Hindi movies have a terrible habit of forgetting that a good mystery requires room to breathe, preferring instead to stuff every frame with props, period furniture, and characters who are clearly waiting for their cue to deliver a witty zinger.

We are told that Mira Rao has a haunted past involving her own professional disgrace, but the film never commits enough time to her interiority to make that baggage land with any real weight. She just shows up, drinks more tea, looks slightly disappointed in everyone's tax evasion strategies, and eventually gathers everyone in the drawing room to explain how the deed was done through a series of flashbacks that contradict the physical evidence we watched five minutes earlier. Ram Kapoor's character, Ashish Kapoor, spends most of his screen time sweating through expensive linen shirts while shouting at his family members about liquidity, and honestly, his performance has more life in it than the actual plotting of the whodunit. By the time the culprit is unmasked, you stop caring about justice or retribution and just want everyone to go home and turn the heating up.