Rahul Khanna wears a linen shirt in this picture that looks like it cost more than the craft services budget for the entire afternoon shift. He spends half his scenes leaning against various high-end doorframes with an expression of mild, weary amusement, as though he just remembered he left the oven on back at his Greater Kailash flat and cannot quite summon the energy to care. It's a small thing but it bugged me from the very first reel.

Rajeev Bhatia’s direction wants to be a sleek neo-noir about the price of desire and the mess we make of our own living rooms. Instead, it feels like an extended corporate presentation for a real estate firm that specializes in terribly lit duplexes with glass coffee tables. The screenplay by Anurag Prapanna works overtime to twist the plot into knots, introducing blackmail schemes and secret assignations with the cheerful predictability of a mid-morning soap opera, though without the comforting anchor of a regular time slot. Characters constantly tell each other they are playing a dangerous game while walking down empty Mumbai stairwells that echo with the hollow clack of prop department footwear.

Sharman Joshi tries desperately to bring some nervous energy to the proceedings as the guy who watches everything fall apart from the cheap seats. He plays the kind of anxious side character who usually spends his screen time adjusting his spectacles and warning the hero about impending doom, but here he is shoved into a narrative triangle that requires him to look smoldering while wearing sweaters that belong on a different continent. Jimmy Sheirgill, meanwhile, has this one specific stare he deploys whenever someone mentions betrayal, a sort of narrow-eyed squint that suggests he is trying to remember if he locked his car doors. It works twice, then gets old.

The cinematography relies heavily on blue filters and hazy interior lighting that makes every apartment look like a hotel lobby at four in the morning. When characters have intense emotional confrontations on balconies, the wind machine just barely ruffles their hair, blowing in from off-camera with a rhythmic hum that occasionally drowns out the background score. That soundtrack by Himesh Reshammiya features a recurring piano motif that arrives every time Tanushree Datta narrows her eyes. If I'm honest, that piano line is catchy enough that it stayed in my head for the cab ride home, even if the scene it accompanied was just another slow-motion pan across a spilled martini.

Datta herself has the heaviest lift, asked to play the sort of ambiguous femme fatale who exists primarily to disrupt the calm domestic arrangements of wealthy men who clearly have too much free time. She has a heavy, hypnotic screen presence that saves several scenes from total collapse, mostly because she refuses to match the manic energy of the guys shouting around her. She simply stands in the center of the frame and lets everyone else look foolish. It reminds me of Urmila Matondkar in Pyaar Tune Kya Kiya, that exact same brand of unpredictable danger delivered with absolute deadpan commitment.

Hindi films have a long and muddy history with these low-budget thriller knockoffs, usually imported straight from Hollywood video stores without the budget to cover the license fee. Raqeeb fits comfortably into that tradition. It is not great, not bad, just there, taking up two hours of your Tuesday afternoon with conversations about trust and betrayal that sound like they were translated from a German manual on toaster repair. Vivake Shauq shows up for a few minutes to provide some comic relief that isn't particularly funny, which feels entirely appropriate for a movie where no one ever quite figures out the punchline.

There is a recurring editorial choice to hold on reaction shots for three seconds too long after every dramatic line of dialogue is dropped. You watch Rahul Khanna blink. Then you watch him blink again. Then the camera slowly cuts to a potted plant before moving on to the next conversation about who slept with whom. It’s an old trick meant to create tension where the script forgot to write any, and after the fourth time it happens, you just start counting the leaves on the fern.

Thematic ambitions here are small-scale at best, boiling down to the notion that rich people have complicated love lives and poor choices lead to wet clothes in the rain. Bollywood movies used to handle this sort of domestic paranoia with a bit more style back in the nineties, when the villains at least got to wear cool leather jackets instead of gray blazers that look rented from a local dry cleaner. By the time the central murder plot finally shambles toward its predictable conclusion, you stop caring who did what to whom. You just want them to sit down, turn on the air conditioning, and stop talking about their feelings near the glass railing.