Sachiin Joshi's leather jacket in Mumbai Mirror has a zipper that goes crooked about twenty minutes in and nobody in the wardrobe department bothered to fix it for the rest of the shoot. It's a small thing, but it bugged me every time he leaned against a desk to yell at a constable. Hindi cinema has spent the last decade trying to clean up its grit, sanding down the rough edges of the underworld until every mobster looks like a stylist walked straight out of Bandra to dress him before a 6 a.m. raid. Here, the dirt looks sticky and the sweat looks real, which makes the whole enterprise feel less like a polished product and more like something pulled out of an editing bay drain after a long night of rain. Director Kaushik Ghatak wants to show us the underbelly of Mumbai, or at least the version of it that exists in loud rooms where people slam telephone receivers down on rotary cradles just to make a point.

Abhijeet Patil is the kind of cop who arrives at a crime scene wearing sunglasses indoors and doesn't take them off even when he's interrogating a weeping widow in a windowless basement. Sachiin Joshi plays him with a singular expression that sits somewhere between mild constipation and deep philosophical boredom. He walks through the frame like he's trying not to step in dog mess on a narrow sidewalk, shoulders hunched and jaw clenched so tight you wonder how he manages his dialogue. It’s not a traditionally good performance, but if I'm honest, it has a certain leaden weight that kind of works for a guy whose primary hobby is smashing beer bottles over the heads of corrupt politicians in broad daylight. You buy that he doesn't sleep much.

Prakash Raj shows up as Shetty, the local don who operates out of a fish market that smells so strongly through the screen you want to reach for an air freshener. He doesn't do much that he hasn't done in a dozen other Hindi movies where he plays the heavy with a gold chain and a raspy laugh, yet he commands the room simply by refusing to blink during his close-ups. When he and Joshi face off across a scarred mahogany table in an abandoned mill compound, the movie actually finds a pulse. The dialogue hits you like wet cement thrown from a moving truck, full of standard-issue threats about cutting people into small pieces and feeding them to stray dogs, but both actors deliver the lines as if they genuinely believe every word.

The supporting cast features Vimala Raman as a journalist who exists solely to look concerned while holding a notepad and asking the exact questions the audience muttered to themselves five minutes earlier. Prashant Narayanan pops in as a twitchy informant with bad teeth and a worse wig, chewing the scenery with an enthusiasm that borders on alarming before disappearing for forty minutes without any narrative explanation. Mahesh Manjrekar is also around, playing a senior police commissioner who spends most of his scenes sitting behind a massive desk stacked with paper files that look like they haven't been opened since the nineties. It's an ensemble built for speed rather than nuance, populated by faces you recognize from twenty different posters pasted up at railway stations.

The cinematography relies heavily on a blue filter that makes every exterior shot look like it was filmed at the bottom of a municipal swimming pool at midnight. Neon signs buzz in the background with an insistent flicker that starts to give you a mild headache around the midpoint of the second half. Editing cuts between dialogue scenes with a frantic, jittery rhythm that feels like the projectionist had a little too much espresso before the matinee screening. Anand Raj Anand's soundtrack does not let up for even a single minute, dropping heavy bass notes and electric guitars into conversations about municipal zoning laws and illegal land grabs.

Ghatak's screenplay tries to juggle about four too many subplots involving extortion, police corruption, and a tragic backstory regarding Joshi's sister that gets dropped into the narrative like an unpinned grenade right before the interval. The narrative logic tends to wobble whenever the cops need to catch a break, usually relying on an informant who happens to be standing around in a dark alley precisely when the protagonist runs out of leads. It reminds me a bit of Shootout at Lokhandwala in its relentless desire to keep the noise floor as high as humanly possible, though it lacks that film's precise sense of logistical geography. You never quite know where anybody is in relation to anyone else, which makes the foot chases through Dharavi feel less like geography and more like a series of disconnected hallways.

There's an odd fascination in watching a production commit this hard to a style of filmmaking that went out of fashion around the time pager sales hit zero. Nobody on screen is trying to reinvent the medium or offer a nuanced critique of modern urban policing; they are just trying to get through the day's pages before the monsoon ruins the exterior lights. By the time the final confrontation rolls around in an empty warehouse filled with hanging sides of beef, you are either fully on board with the nonsense or you've checked your watch five times in a row. It's a loud, messy, structurally incoherent piece of work that stays in your head less for its grand themes and more for the weird way Joshi holds his tea glass with three fingers like an aristocrat at a village tea stall.