Sudip Chatterjee's camera has this habit of catching actors right when they think nobody is watching, during that awkward half-second between dialogue delivery and director's cut, which usually makes for terrible rushes but somehow survives into the final print of Dark Chocolate. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time it happened, robbing certain confrontations of their momentum just because a boom mic shadow drifted across a beige wall for too many frames. We have all seen ripped-from-headlines true crime thrillers before, mostly because the genre sells itself on cheap outrage and fast cash, yet Agni Deb's direction insists on lingering in drawing rooms where the wallpaper looks like it was chosen by someone who had already given up on the marriage. If I'm honest, the entire setup feels remarkably dusty, leaning into that specific brand of middle-aged cynicism that used to populate late-night cable slots before streaming changed how we digest bad behavior.

Mahima Chaudhry walks through the carnage with a kind of heavy-lidded fatigue that mostly works, playing a character loosely cobbled together from public transcripts and sensationalized editorials without ever finding a sharp angle to cut through the noise. She isn't doing the grand return thing here, thankfully, choosing instead to lean into a dull, repetitive sort of malice that feels far closer to actual domestic rot than any movie villainy you would find in mainstream hindi films. When she stares down Riya Sen across a dining table cluttered with half-eaten toast and lukewarm tea, the power dynamic shifts not through shouting or grand declarations of guilt, but through the simple, bruising weight of who gets to sit in the good chair. Sen, for her part, plays the tragic cipher with wide eyes and a breathless cadence that sometimes borders on parody, yet she manages to hold the screen even when the script asks her to deliver exposition while folding laundry.

The pacing is a mess, jumping between police interrogation rooms and sunlit flashbacks with the grace of a dropped tray of glassware, refusing to let any single sequence breathe long enough to generate actual tension. There is an entire stretch in the middle where characters just drive around Kolkata in various states of mild distress while the background score—a synthesized cello that sounds suspiciously like stock library filler—loops over and over until you start praying for silence. It lacks the slick paranoia of something like No Smoking, trading visual invention for endless coverage of people staring at smartphones with expressions of profound irritation. Sudip Chatterjee lights these scenes with a harsh, clinical glare that makes everyone look like they haven't slept in three days, which fits the material, though it also drains the frame of any texture worth looking at.

The script keeps insisting on spelling out moral implications that the actors are already conveying quite clearly with a twitch of an eyebrow or a sudden silence, treating the audience like they need every single beat explained twice. You can feel the ghost of the actual courtroom battle hovering just out of reach, flattened into a series of bureaucratic meetings and hushed phone calls that drain the sensationalism right out of the narrative until it becomes almost aggressively ordinary. That ordinariness is perhaps the film's most honest accidental achievement, because real greed usually looks less like Shakespearean tragedy and more like two people arguing over who owns the spare set of keys to a modest flat in Ballygunge. Still, hindi movies have handled corruption and maternal betrayal with far more style and bite decades ago, making this iteration feel like a xerox of a xerox, faded at the edges and smudged in the middle.

Riya Sen has this one recurring close-up where her lower lip trembles just a fraction too long, a theatrical tic that the editor should have trimmed out on day two of post-production. It ruins a genuinely effective monologue about financial desperation simply because the camera stays parked on her face for an extra five seconds while she waits for the cue to cry. You start watching the mechanics of the performance instead of the character's panic, and once you see the strings, the whole puppet show starts to wobble. Dark Chocolate wants to be a scalpel slicing open the dark underbelly of the urban elite, but it ends up feeling more like a blunt butter knife, leaving jagged edges everywhere it tries to cut.

By the time the credits begin to roll over another one of those droning cello cues, you are left wondering why everyone involved seemed so exhausted before the story even reached its midpoint. There is no catharsis, no grand moral reckoning, just a fade to black that feels less earned and more like the crew simply ran out of lighting fuel and decided to wrap for the night. Mahima Chaudhry gives her final monologue with her back to the camera, staring out a dirty window at a gray courtyard, and for a fleeting second, the picture achieves a quiet, miserable truth about how people destroy each other in small, unmonitored rooms without ever raising their voices. It is a lonely note to leave things on, but it is the only one that rings true.