There is a specific sound a plastic chair makes when someone shifts their weight on a concrete floor in a damp room, and that audio cue repeats at least three separate times during the opening twenty minutes of Anurag Kashyap's produced omnibus
Shorts, which honestly felt a bit lazy in the sound design department if I'm being entirely honest. Anthologies are messy business because the connective tissue is always missing, leaving viewers stranded between wildly different tonal densities and directorial whims. You get five distinct shorts directed by different hands, each trying to capture some bruised fragment of contemporary urban life without drowning in the standard misery porn that usually plagues indie Hindi films. It is not a cohesive movement or a manifesto on celluloid, just a loose bag of cinematic sketches dropped on the table to see which ones roll off and which ones stick.

Neeraj Ghaywan, Siddharth Shiva, Anirban Roy, Rohit Pandey, and Pranjal Dua take turns behind the monitor, resulting in a fractured visual rhythm where the camera style shifts from jittery documentary realism to painterly shadows and back again within the span of a popcorn refill. The screenplay work varies drastically between segments, with some writers trusting the silence of their actors while others rely on heavy exposition dumps to explain internal motivations that should have been shown rather than spoken. When the film works, it manages to find those strange, awkward pockets of human behavior that mainstream Bollywood movies actively ignore in favor of glossy song-and-dance routines or predictable hero arcs. There is an unmistakable rawness to how these characters move through crowded train compartments, cramped apartments, and abandoned industrial lots, avoiding the polished aesthetic of studio products.

Huma Qureshi anchors the most talked-about segment, playing a woman relentlessly stalked by a neighbor in a performance that relies almost entirely on micro-expressions and the terrifying realization of isolation in a densely populated city. Her eyes dart toward a malfunctioning ceiling fan and the peeling wallpaper of her rented room, communicating a visceral claustrophobia that makes you want to check the locks on your own front door. Nawazuddin Siddiqui shows up elsewhere as a man obsessed with a Bollywood actress, chewing through his scenes with that familiar manic intensity that sometimes threatens to spill over into caricature before he pulls it back with a heartbreaking glance. Arjun Shrivastav, Richa Chaddha, Preeti Singh, Sankar Debnath, and Vineet Singh populate the periphery with faces that look like they were pulled directly off local commuter trains rather than a casting agency's active roster, bringing a lived-in authenticity to roles that could easily have devolved into broad stereotypes under less disciplined direction. The supporting players never feel like they are reading lines from a script, which helps ground the more surreal narrative leaps that occur in the middle stretch of the runtime.

Cinematographer Avinash Arun and his fellow camera operators lean heavily into natural light sources, using harsh fluorescent tube bulbs and dim street lamps to carve out characters from the murky background shadows. The soundtrack avoids the swelling orchestral strings that usually tell the audience how to feel, opting instead for ambient city noise, distant traffic hums, and abrupt sonic dropouts that mimic the sudden panic of the characters. It reminds me a bit of the structural audacity found in Ram Gopal Varma's early gritty crime dramas, though with less stylistic swagger and far more interest in domestic psychological pressure.

The thematic spine of the collection deals with obsession, voyeurism, and the slow erosion of personal boundaries in spaces where privacy is an expensive luxury few can afford. Desire in these stories is rarely romantic or redemptively beautiful, twisting instead into something greasy and complicated that lingers long after the credits cut to black. People stare through keyholes, follow strangers down deserted alleys, and harbor secret resentments that fester until they rupture over a lukewarm cup of tea. There is no moral lesson handed down from on high to tie up the loose ends, leaving the audience to sit with the discomfort of unresolved conflicts and ambiguous character turns.

One minor editing choice bugged me throughout the middle segment, where a reaction shot of a boiling kettle lingers for four full seconds after the character has already left the frame, a trick that feels pretentious rather than meaningful. That kind of indulgent pacing pops up whenever a director wants to signal their artistic seriousness without actually earning the emotional weight of the scene. The transitions between the individual films are abrupt, dropping title cards onto the screen with zero fanfare before plunging straight into a completely different visual grammar and social milieu. It creates a viewing experience that feels less like watching a curated exhibition and more like channel-surfing through a cable television lineup at three in the morning when all the prestige dramas have finished for the night.