There is a specific kind of freeze frame used in "Hide and Seek" where Arjan Bajwa looks genuinely confused about where to put his hands, and it happens three times in the first twenty minutes. Not great, not bad, just there. This is a thriller that forgets to be thrilling for long stretches, preferring instead to marinate in the kind of upper-crust gloom that has become a default setting for certain types of urban Hindi films when the directors want to be taken seriously by people who read trade magazines in coffee shops. It stars Purab Kohli, who looks like he wandered onto the wrong set and decided to just stay and see what happened, alongside Mrinalini Sharma, whose character exists mostly to wear heavy coats in poorly lit rooms and stare through frosted glass.

Director Shawn Arranha tries to build a pressure cooker out of damp cardboard. The screenplay borrows heavily from standard slasher tropes that were already feeling a bit dusty back when Ram Gopal Varma was still making pictures worth talking about, minus the genuine menace that made "Kaun" actually work as a single-location exercise in paranoia. Instead of letting silence do the heavy lifting, the sound design insists on dropping heavy metallic thuds every time a character turns a corner, which telegraphs every single jump scare about four seconds before it actually occurs. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how often the editing cuts away from a reaction just as the actor seems to be finding their footing, opting for a wider shot of an empty hallway instead.

Purab Kohli plays his part with a sort of distracted exhaustion that feels closer to a real person trapped in a bad situation than a traditional hero. He mumbles his dialogue half the time, which actually works in his favor because it makes the exposition dumps sound less like a speech and more like someone thinking out loud while waiting for a cab in the rain. Arjan Bajwa, on the other hand, leans hard into the brooding intensity playbook, pacing around luxury apartments with a scowl that suggests he is currently thinking about unpaid utility bills. Mrinalini Sharma is stranded in the middle of this with lines that sound like they were translated from an entirely different language by someone who had never met a human being.

The cinematography relies on a murky blue filter that drains all the warmth out of Mumbai, reducing the city to a series of slick surfaces and neon reflections that look like they were pulled straight from a commercial for high-end bathroom tiles. There is a recurring piano motif on the soundtrack that plays whenever someone opens a door, closes a door, or thinks about opening a door, and after the fourth time it happens you start praying for just five minutes of absolute dead air. Bollywood movies have historically struggled with the locked-room thriller format because our commercial storytelling instincts usually demand a song or a broad comedic interlude to break the tension, and while this film thankfully skips the songs, it replaces them with dead air that feels less like suspense and more like waiting for a bus that is twenty minutes late.

Underneath the generic hood of this whodunit lies a half-baked meditation on guilt and privilege among the young urban elite, though the movie lacks the teeth to actually bite the hand that feeds it. The characters are all ridiculously wealthy yet profoundly miserable, living in cavernous penthouses that look like furniture showrooms, trading passive-aggressive barbs about past traumas that are revealed through sluggish flashbacks. It wants to be a psychological maze about the rot at the core of modern friendships, but it keeps getting distracted by its own glossy lighting and the sheer impossibility of caring which one of these interchangeable people turns out to be the killer. Hindi movies often treat rich people's problems as universal tragedies, and this one commits that sin with a straight face.

By the time the identity of the person behind the masks is finally dragged into the light, the surprise has all the impact of a wet paper towel hitting the floor. You might guess it within the first ten minutes simply because they have the least amount of screen time, or you might stop caring entirely around the midpoint when the plot starts introducing fake-out clues that lead nowhere. It isn't a disaster of a film, nor is it something you will remember by tomorrow afternoon. It just sits there on the screen, taking up ninety minutes of your life that you could have spent doing literally anything else, leaving behind only the faint echo of that piano playing every time someone touches a doorknob.