The sound design on the establishing shots of Bangkok is just a little bit too loud, buzzing with traffic that sounds like it was recorded in a parking lot somewhere in Goregaon rather than actual Thai intersections. Jasmine fragrance and neon signs, if I'm honest, usually do more heavy lifting in these pictures than the actual establishing geography, but Jasmine Smith's entry into the narrative involves a rain-slicked sidewalk and a red dress that defies both meteorology and common sense. Sunny Leone plays her with a kind of detached, slow-blink weariness that occasionally looks like she is just trying to remember where her car keys are parked. We meet Urvil Rais, played by Tanuj Virwani with the permanent, slight wrinkle between the eyebrows of a man who has never quite figured out how his tax bracket works, during an awards ceremony that feels like it was staged in the lobby of a corporate park on a Sunday afternoon. Hindi films have spent decades trying to figure out how to shoot corporate success without making everyone look like they are selling term insurance, and director Jasmine D'Souza mostly solves this by dressing everyone in charcoal grey and bathing them in the kind of cool, blue-tinted light that makes skin look slightly bruised.

The screenplay, credited to Amit Masurkar's general stylistic universe though not his pen, lurches from a chance hotel lobby encounter to a nocturnal car ride that goes on for roughly twenty minutes of screen time too long. Urvil is married to Simran, played by Nyra Bannerjee with a sympathetic sweetness that mostly consists of holding coffee mugs with both hands and looking out of bay windows at Mumbai traffic. The encounter between Urvil and Jasmine is supposed to carry the weight of an irreversible moral pivot, but it is filmed with the cozy, soft-focus sheen of a late-night perfume commercial where nobody is allowed to sweat. They talk in fragments about loneliness and big city pressure, the sort of dialogue that sounds like it was translated from a self-help pamphlet printed in Pune. Virwani uses his hands a lot, adjusting his collar, touching his watch, trying to anchor a scene that keeps threatening to float away into the humid Phuket atmosphere. Leone has fewer lines in the first half-hour, which works in her favor because her pauses often carry more weight than the actual dialogue written for her. There is a supporting actor playing a hotel desk clerk who is so obviously dubbed by someone standing three feet away from a cheap studio microphone that every time he speaks, the illusion of the five-star resort completely falls apart.

Then the morning after happens, and the picture shifts gears from a murky romance into a low-grade psychological thriller involving blackmail and blurry photographs. Ninad Kamat shows up as the heavy, smoking cigarettes in underground parking lots and delivering threats with the weary professionalism of an actor who has played this exact scene in forty other mid-budget thrillers over the last decade. The narrative mechanics here are creaky, held together by duct tape and convenient plot turns that require characters to forget how smartphones work just when a missed call would clear up an entire misunderstanding. D'Souza shoots these confrontation scenes with a handheld camera that bobs up and down as if the operator was walking on a trampoline, which is supposed to convey urgency but mostly just makes you wish for a tripod. The soundtrack relies heavily on a single acoustic guitar riff that repeats every time Urvil looks guilty, and after the seventh or eighth iteration, you start to feel like the guitar is judging you personally for sitting through the second half of the picture.

What keeps this from sinking entirely into the gray sludge of disposable streaming filler is the strange, bruised chemistry between the two leads when they aren't talking. Leone has a specific kind of physical stillness that recalls Zeenat Aman in her 1970s prime, that ability to hold a frame without needing to fill every silence with nervous micro-expressions. Virwani, meanwhile, plays Urvil not as a cad but as an overgrown boy who wandered into a department store after hours and accidentally broke an expensive vase. Their second meeting, in a deserted art gallery where the paintings look like they were bought wholesale from an interior design showroom, has an odd, genuine melancholy that the script doesn't really earn but the actors manage to smuggle in anyway through sheer stubbornness. The film touches on the hypocrisy of urban morality in contemporary India without ever developing a sharp perspective on it, preferring instead to retreat into genre conventions whenever things get too uncomfortable.

Hindi movies have a long and mostly dishonorable history of treating infidelity either as a grave moral failing or a hilarious farce, and this picture tries to split the difference by making it a bureaucratic nightmare. The supporting characters exist purely to push Urvil from one panic attack to the next, never acquiring anything resembling an inner life of their own. Cinematographer Manoj Soni gives the night scenes a rich, amber glow that occasionally redeems the clunkiest dialogue exchanges, lingering on rain droplets sliding down hotel windowpanes with genuine affection. It is a small thing, but it bugged me that every time Urvil opens his laptop, the screen emits a bright blue light that illuminates his face like a theater spotlight, completely ignoring the fact that modern displays don't actually turn people into Smurfs.

By the time the narrative winds down toward its compulsory resolution in a dimly lit warehouse space, you realize the picture has spent two hours running in place while pretending to cover vast emotional distances. The resolution is neat in that artificial way that television movies from the late nineties used to favor, tying off loose threads with knots so tight nobody could ever untie them. Leone delivers her final monologue with a flat, flat-affect delivery that refuses to grant the audience the catharsis they are waiting for, and that stubborn refusal to emote on cue is perhaps the most interesting thing in the entire production. It doesn't reinvent the thriller format, and it certainly won't be remembered alongside the notable releases of its decade, but it occupies that strange, middle-tier space of filmmaking where competence and confusion wrestle for ninety minutes without a clear winner.