Vijay Raaz has this habit of squinting at a doorframe like he's trying to remember if he left the gas on in another century, and it's the only thing that kept me awake through the first twenty minutes of Kartam Bhugtam. We have sat through a mountain of psychological thrillers coming out of Mumbai lately that treat the human mind like a haunted basement with a flickering bulb, and if I'm honest, this one doesn't escape that exact same damp, predictable cellar. The poster promised a psychological game of chess between men whose pasts are catching up with them, but what we actually get is more like checkers played by someone who ate the red pieces.

Soham Shah directs with the kind of heavy-handed gloom that usually signals the DP forgot to take the lens cap off during scouting. He frames faces in deep shadow, not for suspense, but because the actors probably had skin break-outs that day or the budget didn't cover proper bounce boards. The screenplay feels like it was written in 1998, left in the back of a taxi, and then filmed without anyone bothering to update the pagers and landlines. Karma is the theme, obviously, hammered into us through endless repetitions of the title phrase like an uncle who just read his first pop-philosophy paperback and needs everyone at the dinner table to know he's deep now.

Shreyas Talpade plays the earnest everyman caught in the web with his usual repertoire of wide-eyed nods and anxious swallowing, a performance that makes you wish for the weary casualness he brought to Iqbal twenty years ago. He is sweating through his shirts within the first reel, and the moisture looks entirely artificial, sprayed on by a continuity person who had a quota to meet before lunch. Then there's Madhoo, who walks through her scenes with a chilly detachment that suggests she read the script in the vanity van and immediately regretted cashing the advance. When she delivers lines about destiny and payback, her eyes stay completely flat, fixed on a spot just above the camera operator's left ear.

The sound design deserves a special mention because someone in post-production discovered the frequency for low-end drone noises and decided it needed to play under every single conversation about property deeds. It's a small thing, but it bugged me every time they walked into a kitchen. The refrigerators hum in B-flat. The ceiling fans groan with the grief of a Chekhovian tragedy. Even the tea cups clinking against saucers sound like falling masonry, pumped up in the mix until you feel like you're sitting inside a subwoofer during an earthquake.

Hindi movies have a long, muddy history of treating karma as a divine plot device rather than a psychological reality, and this picture leans right into that tired tradition with zero irony. Characters drive up to isolated farmhouses in Madhya Pradesh that look like they were rented off Airbnb for a weekend shoot, complete with props that have barcode stickers still partially peeled off the bottom of the brass lamps. The cinematography alternates between dizzying overhead shots of winding roads and endless close-ups of Vijay Raaz's knuckles clutching a steering wheel, as if movement itself could disguise the fact that nothing is happening in the scene.

There's an obsession with astrology and ancestral curses in contemporary Hindi cinema that feels increasingly lazy, a crutch for writers who don't know how to build dramatic tension out of actual human conflict. Instead of letting characters lie to each other and watch the small fractures spread, the script relies on sudden flashbacks where characters explain their motivations directly to the lens like they're auditioning for an educational video about fraud prevention. Vijay Raaz gets the meatiest bits, naturally, because the man can make reading a grocery list sound like a death sentence, but even he looks stranded when the dialogue demands he explain the karmic balance sheet for the third time in ten minutes.

The supporting cast features a couple of actors who are clearly dubbed by someone else in a studio in Andheri, and the sync is so loose you can practically see the audio track sliding across the screen a fraction of a second before their teeth stop moving. It pulls you right out of whatever grim mood the director spent three minutes establishing with a drone shot of a dry riverbed. Bollywood movies used to hide these little technical hiccups with better pacing or a catchy song, but here we get neither, just thirty-five minutes of mid-tempo background score that sounds like a midi-file version of a Hans Zimmer reject.

We have seen this exact setup done with actual bite in movies like Kaun, where paranoia felt earned and claustrophobic instead of like a lighting choice. Here, the house feels wide open and breezy despite the dark filters, rendering the supposed psychological trap completely toothless. When the big twist arrives, you can spot the narrative scaffolding from the second reel, all those lingering shots of a locked drawer finally paying off in the most tedious way imaginable. There is no grit here, only a sort of polished, digital sheen that makes every frame look like a commercial for home insurance.

Shreyas Talpade spends the final third of the runtime wandering around a decrepit courtyard looking for a diary that was clearly sitting on the table in plain sight since the second scene. It's the kind of editing choice that makes you want to reach into the projector room and fix it yourself. Nobody checks behind the flower pot. Nobody looks at the obvious place. They just pace back and forth while the low-end drone hums away in the walls, reminding us that past actions have consequences and that this movie is almost over.