There is a specific kind of sweat that only a B-grade Hindi thriller from the seventies could produce, the sort of greasy sheen that comes from cheap studio lighting and synthetic fabrics, and director Vasan Bala spends the first ten minutes of Monica, O My Darling trying to replicate it with a digital sensor that costs more than my car. I have seen worse recreations, if I'm honest. The film opens not with an establishing shot or a mood-setting monologue, but with a robot arm swinging wildly in a factory, slicing through metal like it is butter, which immediately tells you something about the tonal chaos you are walking into. It is a movie that wants desperately to be smart, and occasionally remembers to be entertaining, which puts it leagues ahead of most of the prestige content currently clogging up your weekend queue. We are dropped straight into the corporate offices of Unicorn Robotics, where ambitious young men wear striped ties that look like barcode scanners and plot murder over bad coffee. Rajkummar Rao plays Jayantika—wait, Jayant, my mistake, Jayant Arkhedkar—a golden boy who has climbed out of the mud of a small town to become the blue-eyed boy of a billionaire industrialist family, only to find that the people at the top are just as tacky as the ones at the bottom, just with better upholstery. Rao has this way of blinking when he is cornered that makes him look like a cornered rabbit who has recently discovered the joys of insider trading, and it works wonderfully for a character who is essentially a bundle of nerves wrapped in a tailored blazer. The script gives him plenty of dialogue, some of it genuinely sharp, though it occasionally trips over its own cleverness by referencing classic noir tropes just in case the audience didn't notice the venetian blinds casting shadows on the actors' faces. The plot kicks into gear when Jayant gets blackmailed by four different people simultaneously, a logistical nightmare that would give a project manager a stroke, and the ensuing scramble to cover his tracks involves poison, a stuffed panther, and a ridiculous amount of running through dimly lit corridors. Sikandar Kher shows up as the black sheep brother who wears leather jackets indoors and talks in a low, gravelly mumble that suggests he has watched way too many Hollywood gangster flicks on VHS, and while he is mostly there to look menacing, he pulls off a death scene involving a mechanical tiger that had me laughing out loud in a mostly empty screening room. The women fare much better in the friction department, particularly Huma Qureshi, who saunters into the frame with the kind of relaxed, dangerous poise that makes everyone else in the scene look like they are auditioning for a high school play. Qureshi plays Monica, the titular femme fatale who has the kind of laugh that suggests she keeps a shovel in the trunk of her car, and she owns every single second she is on screen without ever seeming like she is breaking a sweat. Her wardrobe alone deserves a separate credit, a glorious parade of sequins and plunging necklines that owes a massive debt to the wardrobe department of Dev Anand thrillers from the late seventies, filtered through a contemporary designer's Instagram feed.

The direction by Bala relies heavily on pastiche, which can be exhausting if you prefer your irony without a neon sign pointing at it. Every frame is crammed with visual references to old Hindi movies, poster art from obscure seventies paperbacks, and framing choices that scream Brian De Palma by way of Sriram Raghavan's Johnny Gaddaar, though it lacks the icy cruelty that made that earlier film such a revelation. The editing by Satyajit Patra keeps things moving at a clip, but there is this one recurring cut to a reaction shot of Rao biting his lower lip that happens at least four times too many, and after the third time, it stops being a character quirk and starts feeling like a crutch. The soundtrack, composed by Achint Thakkar, is easily the best thing about the whole enterprise, a heady mix of disco beats, moody basslines, and brass sections that sound like they were pulled straight from an Ennio Morricone score after a night drinking rum in Bandra. It drives the narrative forward when the plot logic starts to wobble, papering over the narrative contrivances with pure sonic adrenaline. You watch these characters stumble from one catastrophe to the next, poisoning each other's drinks with casual indifference, and you realize that the movie is less interested in the mechanics of the whodunit than it is in the sweaty desperation of social climbers who realize the ladder has been pulled up right before their feet. The supporting cast includes Akansha Ranjan Kapoor as the billionaire's daughter who is far more observant than her frosted lipstick suggests, and Radhika Apte as a cynical cop who chews scenery with such enthusiasm you half expect her to start barking at the villains. Apte is criminally underused, appearing mainly in scenes where she has to look skeptical while examining a bloodstained carpet, but she brings a weary pragmatism to a world that is otherwise entirely ruled by cartoonish malice and greed. The cinematography by Swapnil S. Sonawane embraces the artificiality of its studio sets, refusing to pretend that these backlot offices and suburban bungalows exist in the real world, which gives the picture a claustrophobic, theatrical punch that works in its favor. You are never allowed to forget you are watching a machine at work, a construct built out of genre cliches and cinematic nostalgia, and that transparency saves the film from becoming just another dreary content drop.

Class mobility and the quiet violence of corporate structures run through the background of nearly every scene, though the film is far too busy staging slapstick murder attempts to turn into a heavy-handed lecture on late capitalism. Jayant is a man who knows the exact value of every fork on the dinner table because he had to learn it from a manual, and Rao plays that underlying panic with a nice, jittery restraint that prevents the character from turning into a total monster. Hindi movies have always had a complicated relationship with the wealthy, usually depicting them as either decadent aristocrats who collect crystal vases or shadowy masterminds who live in glass towers, but here the billionaires are just profoundly boring people who happen to have good accountants. The blackmail plot works because everyone involved is desperate to hold onto a status they didn't really earn, trading in secrets and half-truths over lukewarm martinis in dimly lit hotel lounges that smell like stale tobacco and expensive perfume. It is a cynical worldview, but it is delivered with such goofy charm that you don't mind the misanthropy quite as much as you normally would. The script avoids the trap of making anyone particularly likable, opting instead for a collection of scoundrels who deserve every bad thing that happens to them, which frees the audience up to just root for the most creative demise. There is a distinct flavor to this brand of modern genre filmmaking in India right now, one that looks backward at the pulp fiction of the past while winking at an audience that grew up watching YouTube video essays about old film soundtracks, and while it can feel a bit assembly-line at times, it beats the alternative of sheer, unadulterated boredom. The dialogue hits that sweet spot between being stylized and sounding like actual humans talking, even if the humans in question are mostly trying to figure out how to hide a body before their lunch break ends. You get the sense that everyone on set was having an absolute blast playing dress-up in these retro outfits, and that infectious energy bleeds through the celluloid, or the digital equivalent thereof, keeping you hooked even when the plot logic requires you to suspend your disbelief so high it enters the stratosphere. I could have done without the voiceover narration at the beginning, which feels like a nervous director explaining the joke before the punchline can land, but once the machinery gets rolling, it largely stays out of its own way.

The closing stretch of the movie gets increasingly messy, trading its tight noir mechanics for a chaotic scramble of double-crosses and mistaken identities that threatens to derail the entire train just yards from the station. Characters pop up in places they have no business being, motivations shift on a dime to suit the next gag, and the body count rises with such casual frequency that the police might as well not even exist in this particular universe. Yet, there is a strange sort of comfort in watching a genre piece that refuses to take itself seriously for even a single second, opting for pulp over pretension every single time it hits a narrative fork in the road. You leave the theater, or your couch, with the theme music stuck in your head and a vague sense that you've just watched a very expensive, very stylish cartoon about greed and murder. It doesn't fix the state of contemporary cinema, and it certainly won't change the way thrillers are made in the country, but it provides a solid two hours of pulp diversion that doesn't insult your intelligence quite as aggressively as its blockbuster peers. That is a low bar to clear, sure, but in the current climate, I will take a stylish, poison-laced mess over a four-quadrant bore any day of the week.