The shirt Ashish Bisht wears in the third reel is three sizes too tight for him, buttoned up high enough to choke out his larynx, and I couldn't stop looking at it whenever he stood near a window. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me, mostly because the movie wants so badly to be about expensive tailoring and the way clothes drape over people who have given up on everything except looking desirable in a dark bar. Onir has never been a subtle director, which is fine, because subtlety is usually just an excuse for a lack of courage, but Shab feels like someone took a diary filled with twenty-year-old grievances about South Delhi nightlife and forced it through a laminator. You get these long, unbroken takes of people walking down alleyways while the kind of ambient electronic drone plays that you usually hear in the lobby of a boutique hotel where the AC is broken and the staff is ignoring you. Hindi cinema has spent the last decade trying to outrun its own shadow by adopting this washed-out, international-festival aesthetic where nobody ever smiles unless they are being photographed for a magazine that went under in 2011. Bisht plays Afzal, a boy from the hills who has washed up in the capital with a suitcase full of hair gel and an ambition that has no ceiling and no foundation, and he spends half his screen time looking like he just stepped off a bus and realized nobody is waiting for him with a sandwich. He has this way of blinking too fast when someone asks him a direct question, which is an acting choice I suppose, though it gets a little wearing by hour two.

Then there is Simon Frenay as Benoit, a French expat who translates French poetry or sells wine or does something equally vague that leaves him with an enormous amount of downtime to stare out of plate glass windows at the fog rolling over Connaught Place. Frenay acts with his eyebrows mostly, lifting them in that specific continental fashion that suggests he knows a secret about the EU trade agreement that you are too provincial to comprehend. The chemistry between him and Bisht is less about heat and more about two different kinds of exhaustion colliding in a room that smells like stale cigarette smoke and expensive damp wool. Raveena Tandon is somewhere in the background playing a fashion mogul with a voice that sounds like crushed gravel dropped into a tin bucket, and she carries herself with the kind of weary menace that usually belongs in a better movie about people who drink gin before noon. She plays Sonal, a woman who treats her younger lovers the way a collector treats porcelain that she fully expects to drop on a tile floor before the week is out. It’s the kind of performance that reminds you why she was a star in mainstream Bollywood movies before the industry decided it only wanted to make biopics about mathematicians and cricket captains, bringing a lived-in toughness that the script keeps trying to undermine with voiceover poetry about the autumn leaves in Lodhi Garden. The screenplay is structured like a series of missed phone calls, where characters bump into each other at art galleries or high-end boutiques and then immediately start monologuing about their childhood trauma as if the person standing across from them isn't just trying to buy a scarf.

Areesz Ganddi shows up as well, playing an aspiring model whose trajectory is so predictable you can set your watch by his wardrobe changes, which go from off-the-rack polyester to designer denim the second he signs an agency contract. Ganddi has this scene where he breaks down in front of a mirror after a casting director tells him his jawline is too soft, and he just stares at his own reflection with a look of such genuine, pathetic despair that the entire movie tilts sideways for about ninety seconds. You wish the rest of the film had that specific kind of clumsy, unguarded ugliness, instead of always pivoting back to these glossy, amber-lit tracking shots that look like they were lit by someone who read a manual on Wong Kar-wai translations. The cinematography by Hemen Chattopadhyay uses a lot of low angles and heavy grain, which would feel more immediate if the characters weren't constantly speaking in translated dialogue that sounds like it was generated by an algorithm trained on old issues of Vogue India. Everyone in this city is miserable, the film tells us over and over again, usually while someone is standing on a balcony at 3 AM looking down at a three-lane highway with a drink in their hand. It is a very specific type of metropolitan melancholy that only people who live in Defence Colony seem to think is universal, though if I'm honest, the sheer persistence of the gloom eventually wears you down into a state of semi-catatonic acceptance.

There is a recurring piano cue that sounds suspiciously like the temp track from Yann Tiersen's score for Amelie, and it drops in every time a character makes a poor life choice, which means we hear it about once every seven minutes by the time the third act drags its heels into view. The editing by Onir himself tends to linger on reaction shots for three beats longer than necessary, as if the actors need time to convince us they are having an internal life that isn't entirely supported by the dialogue. Hindi films have a hard time with ensemble dramas that don't rely on weddings or funerals to drag everyone into the same room, and Shab tries to solve this by having its characters run into each other at every single high-end cafe in New Delhi as if the entire city consists of four blocks and a round-about. The thematic engine driving all of this is the idea that ambition is a kind of tax you pay on your own soul, but the film never quite decides whether we are supposed to pity these people or ask for their autographs. Afzal goes from wide-eyed nobody to jaded party boy with such narrative whiplash that you half-expect him to check his watch during his own emotional breakdown. The dialogue swings wildly between naturalistic mumblecore exchanges and overwritten pronouncements about loneliness that sound like they were pulled from the back cover of a paperback translation of Albert Camus.

What keeps you watching isn't the depth of the insight or the precision of the plotting, but rather the stubbornness of the production, the way it refuses to look away from people who are being small-minded and selfish in very expensive apartments. There is no grand resolution to any of this, no moment where everyone learns a lesson about the true meaning of friendship or the emptiness of high-society glamour, because Onir seems to know that people like this don't have epiphanies, they just change their shirts and go to another party. The closing scenes drift off into the Delhi smog without so much as a proper fade-out, leaving you with the sound of traffic and that same piano cue looping one last time against a grey sky that looks like wet concrete.