The sound design in the opening twenty minutes of Vodka Diaries features a repetitive, clacking typewriter effect that sounds suspiciously like a stock sound effect dropped directly from a free audio library, and if I'm honest, it set my teeth on edge immediately. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time a character sat down to write a police report, which happens often enough to try a reviewer's patience. Kay Kay Menon plays ACP Ashoke Dixit with his usual intense, slightly frayed-at-the-edges energy, pacing through snow-draped Manali locations that look genuinely freezing on screen. He has this way of squinting against the cold while interrogating suspects that makes you believe he has been awake for thirty-six hours straight without a single decent cup of coffee. The film drops us into a series of grisly murders linked to a local club called Vodka Diaries, and the plotting moves with the breathless urgency of a screenplay written in a single weekend. Kushal Srivastava directs with an earnestness that occasionally tips over into melodrama, pushing the camera into tight, suffocating close-ups whenever Dixit confronts his own fracturing memory. It is the kind of mid-budget thriller that bollywood rarely funds anymore without wrapping the whole thing in glossy corporate sheen, so there is a gritty charm to its rough edges.

Raima Sen appears as Shikha Dixit, the poet wife whose presence hovers over the narrative like a half-remembered dream, though her character often feels less like a real person and more like a collection of melancholic voiceovers designed to cue the audience when to feel sad. Sen tries her best to anchor these ethereal poetry-reciting sequences with genuine emotion, but the script gives her dialogue that belongs on a greeting card rather than in a dark thriller. Mandira Bedi enters later as ACP Khanna, stride confident and voice pitched at a level of authority that cuts through Dixit's chaotic investigative methods. She brings a grounding presence to scenes that threaten to spiral completely out of control, especially during the protracted second-act interrogation sequences where everyone seems to be shouting over one another in a dimly lit room with flickering fluorescent bulbs. The supporting players are a mixed bag, including a bartender whose badly dubbed dialogue doesn't match his lip movements by a full half-second during a crucial late-night confession. It is a recurring issue in these lower-profile hindi movies where post-production audio patching is rushed to meet a tight theatrical window.

Dixit's descent into psychological unravelling bears a passing resemblance to Rahul Bose's work in Before My Eyes, though without that film's precise grip on quiet domestic horror. Here, the psychological stakes are externalized through cheap jump scares and hallucinatory sequences involving mannequins and flickering neon signs that have been done to death in every third-rate mystery released over the last decade. The cinematography by Suraj Kurup leans heavily into blue and grey tones to signify coldness, yet the color grading shifts jarringly from scene to scene, suggesting a tight budget that couldn't quite afford a unified finishing pass in the digital suite. A recurring piano motif plays during the sad flashback moments, striking the same three notes with a persistence that rivals the typewriter sound effect for sheer annoyance. When the narrative pivots toward memory loss and existential dread, the film attempts to grapple with the fragile nature of truth in a resort town where everyone has a secret to hide. Yet it treats these ideas like plot points to be checked off a list rather than concepts to be deeply explored. The pacing slackens considerably right around the middle, bogged down by repetitive conversations in the police station that regurgitate clues we already figured out thirty minutes prior.

There is a fascinating core buried beneath all the genre clichés about grief and guilt, particularly when Dixit starts doubting his own involvement in the very crimes he is supposed to be solving. Hindi films have long struggled with how to depict mental deterioration without relying on tired tropes of madness and pharmaceutical abuse, and Srivastava falls into those exact traps before the halfway mark. He pushes for emotional resonance by having characters stare longingly out of frost-covered windows while jazz music plays on the soundtrack, a visual cliché that stopped feeling evocative back when Ram Gopal Varma was making thrillers in the nineties. Yet, when Menon is allowed to just sit quietly in a chair and look exhausted, the film achieves a strange, haunting momentum that makes you forgive its many budgetary and narrative shortcomings. The climax attempts a mind-bending twist that has been telegraphed so heavily by the preceding dialogue clues that the big reveal lands with a dull thud rather than a shock. It asks the audience to suspend disbelief regarding police protocol and human anatomy to a degree that strains even the loose rules of pulp fiction. As a piece of commercial entertainment, it misses more often than it hits, leaving behind the impression of a better movie that got lost somewhere in the editing room between a demanding producer and a director running out of daylight in the mountains.