Shahid Kapoor’s hair in the opening stretches of Udta Punjab looks like a wet mop left out in a dust storm, which is honestly the most accurate visual choice Abhishek Chaubey makes in the entire picture. You buy him instantly as a washed-up rock star whose rider demands fifty types of imported salt and whose career has decayed into auto-tuned screaming at college festivals in Jalandhar. The movie doesn't start with a wide shot of wheat fields or a voiceover explaining the geopolitical crisis of the border state. It starts with a man vomiting white powder onto the floor of a private jet because the coke is cut with god knows what and his nose is basically rotting off his face from the inside out. If I'm honest, the first twenty minutes move so fast between three different storylines that you spend half your time trying to figure out which character is related to which corrupt local politician or which bag of heroin.

Abhishek Chaubey directs with a sweaty, over-caffeinated urgency that occasionally trips over its own feet, especially whenever the narrative has to cross paths between the pop star, a migrant laborer from Bihar played by Alia Bhatt, a local cop played by Diljit Dosanjh, and a earnest doctor played by Kareena Kapoor Khan who spends half her screen time looking intensely concerned in various dimly lit medical camps. That doctor character is a bit undercooked, to be fair, functioning mostly as a moral compass who exists just to look appalled while someone else explains the statistics of the epidemic over a cup of lukewarm tea. But the visual grammar handles the chaos well, using a bleached-out, neon-heavy palette that feels less like standard Bollywood glossy sheen and more like a cheap motel room after a three-day bender.

Alia Bhatt drops all her usual urban mannerisms here, speaking in a mangled, high-pitched dialect that must have been hell for dialect coaches, though she occasionally overdoes the wide-eyed trauma routine when the script demands she crawl through yet another muddy sugarcane field. It is a massive swing for an actor who spent her early years playing rich kids in designer clothes, and while she doesn't quite match the raw, bruising naturalism she later brought to Highway, she anchors the most grueling stretches of the narrative without blinking. Shahid Kapoor, meanwhile, goes the full method route, shaking, snarling, and screaming his lungs out in hotel bathrooms with a manic intensity that recalls Nicolas Cage at his absolute peak in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,minus the iguanas. He plays Tommy Singh with zero vanity, letting the cameras linger on his sunken cheeks and greasy extensions until you almost forget he used to be the clean-cut romantic lead of every second-tier rom-com churned out by Mumbai studios over the previous decade.

Diljit Dosanjh has a quieter, trickier job as the policeman who looks the other way until his own teenage brother gets hooked on the brown sugar flooding the district, and he handles the transition from complicit bystander to desperate sibling with surprising restraint. There is a specific scene where he sits in a parked jeep, watching his brother foam at the mouth on a hospital gurney, and his face doesn't do any of the grand crying you normally get in mainstream Hindi films. He just blinks, looks away at the dashboard, and lights a cigarette with trembling fingers. It’s a small thing, but that lack of theatricality elevates the entire second half above the standard issue crime drama template that lesser directors would have lazily fallen back on.

Rajeev Ravi’s cinematography deserves a nod simply for refusing to romanticize the landscape, trading the usual picturesque mustard yellow fields of Punjabi cinema for greasy industrial outskirts, gray skies, and suffocatingly cramped interiors where people yell over bad techno music. The soundtrack, composed by Amit Trivedi, hits you over the head with its heavy basslines and aggressive folk-rap hybrids, though the titular track plays maybe two or three times too many during various montage sequences of people running through rain or staring blankly into mirrors. You get it, the music says, drugs are bad and everyone is flying high on artificial courage until they crash hard on the pavement.

The script gets bogged down in a needlessly convoluted cartel subplot involving local politicians and shadowy drug lords who talk in low, menacing growls while sitting in sprawling farmhouses, which feels imported from a generic action movie rather than this specific regional tragedy. Whenever the movie steps away from those boardroom villain scenes and focuses purely on the physical and psychological rot of addiction, it vibrates with genuine anger. It is messy, uneven, and occasionally too loud for its own good, much like the music Tommy Singh screams into his microphone before sprinting off stage to puke in a metal bucket.

By refusing to offer a neat, redemptive arc where every single person cleans up their act and goes back to farming organic wheat, the film leaves a bad taste in your mouth, which is clearly the point. Tommy doesn't become a saint. The migrant girl doesn't magically win a state-level cricket tournament. They just survive the night, bruised and heavily medicated against the reality waiting for them outside the frame, and the credits roll while a harsh synth beat rattles your teeth.