Abhishek Bachchan wears a wig in Bob Biswas that looks less like a hairpiece and more like a dense animal pelt glued to a bowling ball, and if I'm honest, that distraction takes a good twenty minutes to get past before you can even look at his face. Sujoy Ghosh wrote the original character for Saswata Chatterjee in Kahani a decade ago, a twitchy little insurance agent who dispensed casual murder with the flat affect of a man buying potatoes, and trading that slippery, unsettling energy for a hulking, amnesiac family man feels like a bait-and-switch right out of the gate. But Diya Annapurna Ghosh, directing her first feature here, isn't interested in making a straight prequel or a satisfying character study, choosing instead to drop this lethargic assassin into a rainy, neon-smeared Kolkata that resembles a graphic novel left out in the gutter to warp and bleed. Screenplays written by Ghosh usually rely on elaborate rug-pulls and narrative trapdoors, but this script moves in a strange, groggy half-sleep, wandering through dimly lit pharmacy aisles and municipal offices where nobody ever seems to be doing actual work.

The amnesia angle is a tired narrative crutch, the kind of blunt instrument lazy writers use when they want an already established antihero to suddenly grow a conscience without having to earn the redemption arc through actual remorse. Bob wakes up in a hospital bed with a wife played by Chitrangda Singh who looks at him with a mixture of enduring affection and total exhaustion, and a teenage stepson who acts like any normal Kolkata teenager who would rather be staring at his phone than dealing with a father who has forgotten how to reload a revolver. Bachchan plays him with his shoulders permanently hitched up toward his ears, lumbering down narrow alleyways with the awkward physical geometry of a refrigerator being pushed down a flight of stairs, huffing and puffing as he tries to remember if he liked sugar in his tea or what kind of hit he was supposed to pull off before he took a bullet to the skull. It is a performance of pure physical weight, grounded entirely in sweat, heavy breathing, and a perpetual look of mild confusion that occasionally hardens into cold, efficient muscle memory whenever a couple of local thugs try to corner him behind a tea stall.

Paran Bandopadhyay sweeps in as Kalida, the shady homeopathy practitioner who doubles as a handler and drug supplier, and every single scene he shares with Bachchan crackles with a weird, domestic kind of menace that makes the high-concept shootouts look completely dull by comparison. They sit in cluttered back rooms surrounded by glass tincture bottles, arguing about dosages and forgotten pasts while the ceiling fan creaks above them, and these small, dialogue-heavy beats reveal more about the grubby reality of contract killing in Kolkata than any number of slow-motion gunfights orchestrated against a backdrop of damp brick walls. The city itself is shot by Gairik Sarkar with a bruised palette of purples and sickly greens, making every street corner look like it was recently scrubbed with dirty mop water, which fits the general mood of a movie that refuses to give you a single character who smells like soap. Yet for all the moody atmosphere, the background score keeps leaning on the exact same three-note synth pulse every time Bob starts to remember his past life, and after the fourth or fifth repetition, that auditory cue becomes genuinely grating, dragging down sequences that were already moving at a sluggish crawl.

Hindi films have a long and storied history of trying to graft Western genre tropes onto domestic locations, usually ending up with something that feels either too polished or too chaotic to register as real, but Bob Biswas sits in a weird middle zone where it feels almost aggressively minor in scope. It lacks the propulsive, breathless momentum of Badlapur or the gritty, hyper-localized authenticity of something like Paatal Lok, opting instead for a meandering middle portion where Bob just wanders around trying to find out who he actually is while various criminal syndicates and corrupt cops hunt him down for reasons that remain stubbornly fuzzy. Chitrangda Singh doesn't get nearly enough to do besides look worried in poorly lit kitchens and deliver lines about household finances with a weary sigh, reducing a potentially complex dynamic between a killer and his unknowing spouse to a series of repetitive domestic checks. The action choreography is functional rather than thrilling, featuring too many close-quarters scuffles where people bump into shelves and roll over small tables in cramped apartments, avoiding the elaborate set pieces you might expect from a modern studio thriller.

There is a recurring visual motif involving blue and red pill bottles that gets hammered home with the subtlety of a falling anvil, reminding us every ten minutes that Bob's memory is chemically controlled by forces he cannot see or understand, which feels almost insulting to the intelligence of an audience watching a Wednesday afternoon matinee. When the double-crosses finally arrive in the third act, involving competing drug cartels pushing a new blue stimulant called Blue in local schools, the plot gets tangled up in logistical knots that the direction simply doesn't have the kinetic energy to untangle cleanly. You can see the ghost of a much sharper, nastier character study haunting the edges of this production, one that might have actually explored the banality of evil without needing a convenient head injury to wipe the slate clean of past sins. Abhishek Bachchan does manage to make you feel the sheer exhaustion of a man dragging an unwanted history behind him like a sack of wet cement, but the movie surrounding him is too scattered, too reliant on mood over mechanics, and too content to just drift along the rainy streets of Bengal until the credits mercifully drop without ever fully deciding what kind of story it actually wanted to tell in the first place.