That background extra in the second segment who keeps chewing his paan while the district magistrate yells at him is entirely too distracting, though to be fair, nobody else seems to care. If I'm honest, that kind of sloppy blocking happens all the time in modern anthologies, but here it stands out because the surrounding frame is otherwise so rigorously nailed down. This is an omnibus feature that actually remembers to breathe between its distinct narrative lunges, dividing its runtime across three wildly different tonal registers without losing the thread of administrative absurdity that ties them together. The portmanteau format has seen better days in Hindi films, usually collapsing under the weight of an overarching thesis statement that nobody had the budget to sustain, yet this project manages to avoid that specific trap by letting each segment breathe its own contaminated air. Gurvinder Singh, Kaushik Ganguly, and Bhaskar Hazarika split the directorial duties, and instead of fighting each other for stylistic dominance, they achieve a strange, ragged harmony that feels closer to the actual texture of government paperwork than any prestige drama about corruption has a right to be.

Rajesh Awasthi carries the heaviest load in the opening third, playing a minor functionary whose spine has long since turned to wet cardboard, and he does this terrifying thing with his shoulders whenever a superior walks past. It is a posture born of decades in dusty provincial offices where saying no to a bad order requires more courage than most people possess, and Awasthi communicates that exhaustion without ever leaning into caricature. Jitendra Kumar shows up later and plays against his usual eager-beaver streaming persona with a bruised kind of stillness, dragging himself through a quarantine facility that looks less like a medical station and more like an abandoned cattle shed. Boloram Das brings a quiet, heavy-lidded dignity to the middle chapter that anchors the proceedings whenever the script threatens to veer into broad farce, while Johny Lever does something genuinely unexpected by dropping his entire bag of comedy tricks to play a man whose spirit was crushed years ago by casual cruelty. Then there is Nimisha Sajayan, whose Malayalam-language work has been setting a high bar for years now, navigating the linguistic and cultural shift of her segment with a bruised intensity that makes you forget she is operating outside her usual wheelhouse. No one is doing the big, scenery-chewing routine that usually wins awards in bollywood movies, which means the smaller moments of hesitation and swallowed pride carry twice the weight.

The cinematography refuses to use that desaturated, muddy filter that every second indie thriller thinks is mandatory for gritty realism, opting instead for a blown-out, dusty sunlight that makes the heat practically radiate off the screen. You can feel the grit of the courtyard dust settling on the camera lens during the outdoor sequences, and the sound design deserves special mention for the way it layers ambient bicycle bells and distant train horns underneath dialogue that is often muffled by bad acoustics. It reminded me a bit of Vetri Maaran's Asuran in how it treats location not as a pretty backdrop but as an active participant that wears down the characters until they are just frayed versions of themselves. Yet there are editorial choices that baffle, like a recurring cutaway to a stray dog that happens three separate times during a crucial confrontation, which feels less like a recurring motif and more like someone ran out of B-roll and panicked in the editing bay.

Bureaucracy in cinema usually gets painted with broad strokes of mustache-twirling villainy, but this film understands that true institutional malice is mostly just bored people filling out forms incorrectly while someone else dies of thirst in the waiting room. The first segment deals with a sanitation worker assigned to carry a dead politician's portrait through a riot, the second examines the nightmare of migrant quarantine during the pandemic panic, and the final piece looks at the surreal logistics of executing a death row inmate when nobody can find the right rope. These are not comfortable subjects, and the screenplay by Divya Prakash Dubey and others refuses to offer the kind of tidy moral arc that lets the audience go home feeling morally superior to the characters on screen. It is a very specific type of misery, one that smells faintly of cheap phenyl and carbon paper, and Hindi movies rarely allow their protagonists to be this thoroughly beaten by the system without at least one speech about hope.

There is no grand catharsis at the end of the runtime, no rousing courtroom monologue where the hero exposes the conspiracy and saves the day, because that is not how these stories ever resolve in reality. The characters simply go back to their desks, or their shacks, or their endless waiting lists, carrying the same quiet humiliation they had when the projector started spinning. It is a minor miracle that the film avoids the temptation to tie everything up with a neat, life-affirming ribbon, choosing instead to fade out on a shot of a ceiling fan wobbling dangerously on a rusted bolt. You leave the theater thinking about that stray dog and the paan-chewing extra and the way Awasthi's character wouldn't look the camera in the eye during the final tracking shot, which is probably the only kind of staying power that actually matters.