Sonam Kapoor wears a yellow cabin crew scarf in the opening minutes of Neerja and somehow it doesn't look like a costume department leftover pulled from a bargain bin in Andheri. That specificity matters because so many Hindi films about real historical violence lean on a hazy, sepia-toned gloss that turns human beings into saints before the opening credits even finish scrolling down the screen. Director Ram Madhvani doesn't do that. Instead, he drops us straight into the suffocating, beige-carpeted interior of a Pan Am flight sitting on a tarmac in Karachi, where the air conditioning is already sputtering out and the passengers are starting to sweat through their poly-blend trousers.

The screenplay by Saiwyn Quadras gives the ensemble just enough room to breathe before the hijackers board with their duffel bags full of submachine guns and cheap anxiety. You get tiny domestic arguments over seat assignments and spilled tomato juice that ground the situation in a recognizable, mundane reality before the guns come out. If I'm honest, the first twenty minutes before the plane doors close feel a bit rushed, like the editing room had to trim half a reel of character setup just to hit a runtime that multiplex owners wouldn't complain about. Yet that breathlessness actually works in the film's favor once the terrorists storm the cabin because there is zero transition time between normal life and absolute terror.

Sonam Kapoor plays Neerja Bhanot with a trembling sort of courage that feels entirely earned rather than manufactured by a writer trying to hit an emotional quota. She isn't shouting inspirational speeches or glaring heroically into the middle distance while Hans Zimmer rip-offs swell on the soundtrack. When her voice cracks during a tense exchange with the lead hijacker played by Jim Sarbh—who brings a twitchy, erratic menace to the screen that keeps everyone guessing—you can practically smell the cold fear radiating off her skin. Kapoor was never known as an actress who could carry a heavy dramatic picture on her own shoulders, but Madhvani frames her mostly in tight close-ups that trap her face against the claustrophobic bulkhead, forcing her to do the heavy lifting with subtle twitches of her jaw and wide, panicked eyes that dart toward the emergency exits.

Shabana Azmi shows up as the mother, Rama Bhanot, and she delivers the kind of performance that makes you wonder why we bother casting anyone else in these types of maternal roles. There's a particular scene near the middle where she's standing in her living room in Mumbai, clutching a landline receiver while listening to conflicting news reports on Doordarshan, and her lower lip barely trembles. It’s a masterclass in economy. She doesn't scream or tear her hair out. She just stands there, aging ten years in the span of thirty seconds as the gravity of the hijacking sinks into her bones. Beside her, Shekhar Ravjiani is fine as the romantic interest, though his character is basically just an accessory to the plot who exists to give Neerja someone to text during layovers, which is a bit of a letdown considering how sharply drawn the rest of the supporting players are.

The camera work by Mitesh Mirchandani deserves its own mention because it refuses to sit still or give the audience a comfortable vantage point. The frame bounces, shakes, and squeezes into overhead luggage bins and cramped aisle spaces, making you feel like a terrified coach passenger who forgot to take an anti-anxiety pill before boarding. There's a distinct lack of glossy Bollywood sheen here, thank god. The lighting inside the fuselage shifts from harsh fluorescent glare to murky emergency red, casting long, ugly shadows across bruised faces and sweating foreheads. When the soundtrack does kick in, it avoids the usual orchestral trap of telling you exactly how to feel every single second, relying instead on ambient noise like the whir of failing jet engines and the muffled crying from economy class.

One small technical detail bugged me every single time it popped up, which is the slightly dodgy continuity during the gunfire sequences near the rear galley, where an extra in a blue sweater drops to the floor twice in consecutive cuts. It’s a small thing, but continuity errors like that pull you out of the illusion just enough to remember you are sitting in a dark theater with a box of stale popcorn. Also, the sound design relies a bit too heavily on the exact same metallic click of a rifle bolt being pulled back every three minutes, as if the editors were worried we might forget there were guns on the plane. But these are minor quibbles when matched against the sheer physical intensity of the direction.

Madhvani stages the action inside that Boeing 747 with a documentary-like grit that recalls Paul Greengrass without feeling like a cheap carbon copy of United 93. He understands that real terror isn't about explosions and slow-motion hero shots; it's about the stale smell of sweat, the buzzing of a fluorescent light bulb that needs replacing, and the agonizing wait between one bad decision and the next. The hijackers aren't cartoon villains twirling their mustaches or reciting grand political manifestos about global liberation. They are paranoid, exhausted young men making bad choices by the minute, which makes their unpredictability far scarier than any fictional monster Hollywood or Mumbai usually dreams up.

The thematic heart of the movie avoids the flag-waving patriotism that sinks so many modern Hindi films dealing with national tragedies. It isn't really about geopolitics or counter-terrorism protocols. It’s about a twenty-three-year-old girl who had already survived a terrible marriage and a dead-end modeling career before finding a strange kind of grace in the middle of a metal tube parked on a runway. She was afraid of failure, she was afraid of disappointing her parents, and when the moment came, she was probably terrified of dying alone in a foreign country while wearing a Pan Am uniform. The film lets her keep all those ordinary flaws instead of washing them away with hagiography. When the credits finally roll over actual photographs of the real Neerja Bhanot smiling back at the camera, you aren't thinking about cinematic milestones or box office records. You are just sitting there in the dark, wondering how anyone ever finds the strength to do the right thing when the cabin lights go out.