Dulquer Salmaan pronounces the word "critic" with a slight, almost imperceptible drag on the hard consonant that tells you he has spent entirely too much time reading what people wrote about his last three releases. If I'm honest, that specific cadence is the most interesting thing in the first twenty minutes of Balki’s latest outing, a picture that wants so badly to be a meta-textual slasher flick about the ethics of film criticism that it forgets to actually scare anyone. We are dropped into a Mumbai where reviewers are being sliced up with surgical precision, each murder corresponding to a bad star rating left on a web portal or in a morning broadsheet. It is a premise ripped straight from a midnight-movie fever dream, but the execution leans heavily on the kind of glossy, sterile framing that usually accompanies a high-end real estate commercial.

There is a sequence early on where a particularly pompous reviewer gets his throat opened while aggressively typing a pan of a terrible romantic comedy, and the sound design just leans into the click-clack of the mechanical keyboard until it makes your teeth itch. R Balki directs with his usual insistence on visual symmetry, framing characters against floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the Mumbai skyline whether they can afford the rent or not. The screenplay, co-written with Rishi Virmani and Raja Sen, wants to have a serious conversation about the power dynamic between the artist and the person who sits in the dark and writes four hundred words about the lighting. Yet it keeps getting distracted by its own cleverness, layering in obscure Guru Dutt references like Easter eggs for film school dropouts who refuse to let the Golden Age of Hindi cinema lie down in peace. The pacing suffers from a strange kind of sluggish urgency where characters run through conversations at breakneck speeds only to stand in silence for five agonizing seconds while the camera tracks slowly across a shelf of old DVDs. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me every single time it happened, this sudden refusal of motion in scenes that were already gasping for breath.

Sunny Deol lumbers through the proceedings as an IGP with a permanent furrow in his brow and a voice that sounds like gravel rolling down a tin roof. He brings a heavy, grounded exhaustion to a movie that is constantly trying to float away on its own absurd premise, anchoring the ridiculousness simply by refusing to wink at the camera. When he looks at a crime scene and delivers a line about the death of honest opinions, you believe he actually cares, even if the script around him is basically just a series of thinly veiled grievances the filmmakers likely collected from their own Twitter mentions over the years. Shreya Dhanwanthary plays a entertainment reporter who falls into Salmaan's orbit with a breezy, caffeinated charm that makes you wish the whole movie was just her navigating the treacherous waters of PR-driven junkets and compromised editorial boards. Pooja Bhatt pops up as a criminal psychologist whose office looks like a Pinterest board for a haunted library, chewing on her dialogue with a weary precision that suggests she knows exactly how silly this whole enterprise is.

Visually, Vishal Sinha’s cinematography treats Mumbai like a giant neon-drenched mood board, bathing every rainy night alley in electric blues and hot pinks that feel entirely disconnected from any actual city on earth. It looks expensive, certainly, but it lacks the grit that a story about serial murder in the underbelly of the entertainment industry desperately requires. Then there is the soundtrack, credited to Sneha Khanwalkar and others, which relies far too heavily on a humming, discordant vocal motif that shows up every time someone looks suspiciously at a flower pot or a rolling pin. That specific musical cue repeats so often during the second act that you can practically set your watch by it, draining the tension right out of the frame before the knife even comes out of the drawer. It echoes the frantic, scattershot energy of certain nineties thrillers, though without the genuine sleaze that made those pictures memorable.

The film attempts to frame its homicidal maniac not as a monster but as an avenging angel for directors who suffered at the hands of snarky keyboard warriors, a moral stance that feels increasingly embarrassing the longer you dwell on it. You can feel the wounded vanity bleeding through the edges of the celluloid, transforming what should have been a fun, trashy genre exercise into a two-hour therapy session for people who read their notices on release day. Salmaan manages to locate a strange, gentle vulnerability beneath the psychotic break, playing the romantic lead with a wide-eyed intensity that recalls his work in Ok Kanmani, though here the object of his affection is a blood-spattered review column rather than a fellow architect. That juxtaposition of soft-spoken romance and brutal retribution never quite gels into something coherent, lurching from a sunlit romance in a flower market to a pitch-black slaughterhouse without earning the tonal shift.

By the time the narrative stumbles toward its bloated climax in an abandoned studio lot, the meta-commentary has swallowed itself whole, leaving behind a husk of arguments about art and commerce that sound like they were overheard at a late-night canteen after a disastrous screening. It lacks the teeth of a real satire and the pulse-pounding mechanics of a proper thriller, hovering in a strange, middle-distance limbo where neither the laughs nor the gasps land with any real force. Deol gives it his absolute all in the final confrontation, roaring lines about the sanctity of creation with a vein popping on his forehead, but the movie has already spent its last good idea twenty minutes prior. Hindi films have a long and storied tradition of dealing with the madness of the creative process, yet this particular entry mistakes bitterness for insight and petulance for provocation.