The sound design in the first ten minutes of Akelli relies too heavily on that low-frequency drone everyone has been using since Denis Villeneuve figured out how to rattle multiplex subwoofers, and honestly, it gets old fast. You are sitting there waiting for some actual ambient texture from the cramped Punjab kitchen where Jyoti lives with her family, but instead you get this constant, vibrating hum that feels less like tension-building and more like a refrigerator that needs a mechanic. Pranay Meshram’s directorial debut wants you to feel the squeeze of domestic duty and financial desperation before everything goes sideways, yet it starts leaning on cinematic shorthand way too early. Jyoti is just trying to scrape by, sending money back home while dealing with the kind of passive-aggressive uncles who treat every working woman in the family as personal property, which is familiar territory for anybody who has spent time watching contemporary Hindi movies.

Nushrratt Bharuccha carries almost every frame of this thing once the location shifts to Mosul, and she manages to drop the bubbly, comic-timing-heavy persona she leaned on back in her Pyaar Ka Punchnama days without making a huge deal out of it. She does not play Jyoti as an instant action hero who suddenly knows how to disarm a militant with a kitchen knife, which is a relief because too many Bollywood movies treat ordinary civilians like dormant Jason Bournes just waiting for a crisis to activate their combat skills. Instead, she just looks exhausted, terrified, and fundamentally out of her depth, hiding behind pillars and breathing too loudly when men with automatic rifles walk past the doorway. Nishant Dahiya pops up briefly as her fiancé before the narrative machinery drags her off to Iraq for a desk job that turns into a nightmare, and while his screen time is short, he brings a grounded, slightly awkward realism to the early romantic setup that prevents it from feeling like purely functional exposition.

Once the ISIS fighters take over the textile factory where Jyoti and dozens of other Indian workers are trapped, the film shifts gears into a survival thriller that owes a massive debt to something like Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down without having the budget or the wide-angle lenses to match the scale. The cinematography by Anuj Rakesh Dhawan gets very dark and very handheld, sometimes to the point where you cannot actually tell who is shooting at whom in the dusty, half-lit corridors, though maybe that confusion is the whole point of putting you inside a chaotic urban combat zone. What bugged me was the supporting villain played with terrifying, gravelly intensity by Tsahi Halevi, who commands the screen as a local commander yet suffers from a slightly distracting, hollow-sounding ADR dub in his Hindi dialogue that takes you right out of the illusion for a few seconds every time he opens his mouth.

The script, credited to Meshram alongside Gunjan Saxena and Abhay Singh, tries to balance the gritty reality of the 2014 Mosul crisis with a deeply internal character study about an ordinary woman finding reserves of courage she did not know she possessed, and that double-duty strains the narrative seams. Rajesh Jais shows up as the desperate uncle back in India trying to pull political strings, and those scenes cut away from the tension in Iraq just when the movie has its claws in you, breaking the rhythm in a way that feels calculated to pad out the runtime. Hindi films have historically struggled with how to depict geopolitical crises without turning them into nationalistic flag-waving exercises, and while Akelli mostly avoids shouting slogans, it still occasionally forces moments of emotional realization that feel bolted on by a writer sitting in a room thinking about what the audience needs to feel instead of letting the scene breathe on its own terms.

There is a sequence midway through where Jyoti has to hide underneath a row of bloody uniforms in a laundry room while insurgents search the building, and the camera lingers on her twitching eye for three seconds longer than comfortable, which is precisely the kind of bold, uncomfortable choice that makes you forgive the picture its clunkier political speeches. The soundtrack by Avi Mishra and Rohin-Prasad mostly stays out of the way, preferring silence and ambient grit over swelling orchestral cues, though there is one recurring piano motif that shows up whenever Jyoti thinks about her mother that feels like it wandered in from a completely different, much softer television drama. Bharuccha does her best work in the quiet pauses between the explosions, sitting on a concrete floor with her knees pulled up to her chin, staring at a cracked phone screen that has no signal left.

The film ends on a note that refuses to offer easy catharsis or wrap up the geopolitical trauma with a neat bow, choosing instead to focus on the lingering psychological damage of a woman walking back onto a tarmac in Amritsar with hollow eyes. It is uneven, occasionally frustrating in its plotting, and hampered by a mid-section that drags its feet while cutting back and forth between two vastly different continents, but it respects its lead actor enough to let her sweat through every single minute of the ordeal without resorting to cinematic miracles.