There is a specific kind of squint Manisha Koirala does in Maska when she is trying to read a ledger without her glasses that immediately drags you right back into the nineties, even though this thing dropped on Netflix with all the crisp, slightly washed-out digital sheen of an ad for a boutique hotel. Rustom’s is the sort of crumbling, high-ceilinged Irani café that smells permanently of stale butter and burnt sugar, tucked away in some corner of Mumbai where the real estate sharks are circling with checkbooks out, and if you have ever spent an afternoon nursing a lukewarm bun maska while watching ceiling fans wobble on their rusted rods, the opening twenty minutes of Neeraj Madhav’s film hit with a weird, dusty kind of accuracy. It is not great, not bad, just there, floating somewhere in the crowded ecosystem of contemporary hindi movies that try to balance nostalgia for a dying city against the frantic hustle of young people who just want to make enough money to buy an apartment in Bandra with a sea view. Prit Kamani plays Rony, a boy saddled with the legacy of a legendary parsi bakery who would rather be shooting bad-looking casting-couch reels for low-end television commercials, and he plays him with that particular brand of twitchy, aggressive charm that makes you want to lock him out of the kitchen and throw away the key. Shirley Setia shows up as the aspiring writer who serves as his moral compass, though calling it a performance feels a bit generous given how much she relies on a single, perpetual expression of mild disapproval that she wears through every single scene.

Neeraj Udhwani directs with a curious sort of slackness, letting scenes breathe past the point of comfort and then suddenly rushing through emotional beats that really needed about three more minutes of silence to land properly. There is a sequence where Rony finally confesses his desire to sell the café to a sleek developer, and instead of letting the camera sit on Koirala’s face as the betrayal sinks in, the editor cuts away to a totally irrelevant reaction shot of an old waiter wiping down a marble-topped table, and it is a small thing but it bugged me the whole afternoon. That cut kills the momentum dead, turning what should have been the emotional hinge of the second act into a mildly confusing transition that leaves you wondering if someone dropped frames in post-production. The screenplay tries desperately to juggle three different tones at once—kitchen-sink family drama, quirky romantic comedy, and straight-faced real estate thriller—without ever committing long enough to any of them to make the tonal shifts feel earned. It reminds me a bit of Roy Andersson by way of Yash Raj Films, minus the formal rigor or the budget, resulting in a strange hybrid where the actors look like they are inhabiting completely different genres depending on who is standing in the frame with them. When Koirala is on screen alone, quietly muttering to her late husband over a vat of bubbling khari biscuits, the movie actually achieves something close to genuine warmth, capturing the specific, stubborn pride of old Bombay people who refuse to acknowledge that the world they built has already been paved over.

Kamani works hard, Lord knows he works hard, throwing his entire body into physical comedy bits involving falling sacks of maida and frantic motorbike rides through monsoon traffic, but he lacks the effortless screen presence that made someone like Shah Rukh Khan own this exact kind of chaotic energy back in the day. He is always performing the boyish charm rather than just inhabiting it, which leaves every romantic exchange with Setia feeling like a dress rehearsal for a commercial that hasn't been cast yet. Setia, for her part, delivers lines as though she is reading them off a teleprompter positioned just behind the camera lens, her voice devoid of any local texture or lived-in cadence. The supporting cast fares slightly better, particularly Javed Jaffrey in a brief, uncredited cameo that brings a sudden blast of actual comic timing into a room that had grown thoroughly stale. But the movie keeps pulling back from its own best instincts, terrified that modern audiences might get bored if there isn't a montage of Mumbai street food set to an acoustic guitar pop track every ten minutes. Speaking of which, that exact same acoustic track—the one with the breathy female vocals and the plucky ukulele—plays at least four distinct times during emotional peaks, and by the third repetition, you start praying for the sweet relief of absolute silence. It is an epidemic in modern hindi films, this reliance on wall-to-wall indie-pop comfort food to tell the audience exactly how they are supposed to feel about an old lady crying over a broken tea strainer, and it flattens out whatever rough edges the narrative manages to sharpen on its own.

What saves the project from total collapse is the cinematography by Jayesh Nair, who manages to make the cramped, grease-stained interior of Rustom’s look like an Edward Hopper painting during the early morning hours when the first shafts of yellow light hit the glass jars of shrewsbury biscuits. He finds genuine poetry in the way flour dust hangs in the air, catching the light like tiny diamonds before settling onto the worn wooden counters where decades of families have argued over bills and arranged marriages. There is a lovely, unhurried tracking shot early on that follows a tray of freshly baked mava cakes from the roaring brick oven all the way to a customer's table, and for about sixty seconds, you completely forget about the clunky dialogue and the forced romantic subplots. The soundtrack relies too heavily on predictable chord progressions that signal tragedy or triumph with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but the sound design itself is remarkably dense, filled with the constant, low-level roar of BEST buses passing outside, the heavy clatter of porcelain, and the hiss of steam wands that give the fictional café a pulse of its own. This is where the film finds its actual thematic weight, located not in the limp romance between the leads or the predictable generational conflict over selling out versus staying true to one's roots, but in the sheer physical labor of keeping an old institution alive against the tide of history. Bollywood movies have always had a complicated relationship with the concept of heritage, usually reducing it to a set of sentimental clichés about mothers and temples, but here the heritage is literal, sticky, and exhausting. It is about waking up at four in the morning to knead dough in the dark, and Koirala communicates that bone-deep weariness simply through the way she drags her feet across the tiled floor or rubs her lower back after a twelve-hour shift.

The script ultimately trips over its own feet when it tries to wrap everything up in a neat, feel-good bow that feels entirely unearned given the mess Rony has made of his life and everyone else's. You don't just bounce back from attempted corporate betrayal and familial neglect with a single montage of baking a really good batch of maska bun, no matter how much the director wants you to believe in the redemptive power of dairy fat and yeast. Yet, despite the narrative shortcuts and the flat performances from the younger leads, there remains something stubbornly watchable about the whole enterprise, largely because the ghost of a better, sharper film keeps haunting the edges of the frame. It belongs to that vast middle tier of streaming releases that will likely be playing in the background while people scroll through their phones on a lazy Sunday afternoon, providing intermittent flashes of genuine charm before fading completely from memory by Monday morning. If I'm honest, I have already forgotten half the plot points regarding the secondary romantic subplot involving Rony’s friend, but I still remember the exact shade of blue on the tiles behind the counter at Rustom’s, and sometimes that is quite enough to get you through the third act of a mediocre streaming drama.

The closing moments offer no grand revelations about the state of modern urban existence or the eternal struggle between commerce and tradition, choosing instead to focus on a small, quiet interaction between an aging aunt and a nephew who finally figured out how to operate an industrial oven without burning his eyebrows off. It is an abrupt, unceremonious way to end a story that spent two hours trying to be a grand statement on cultural preservation, and that smallness suits it far better than any grandiloquent final monologue ever could.