Nawazuddin Siddiqui has played many things over the years, though I cannot recall the last time he had to carry a prosthetic chin quite this heavy across a gravel driveway. It’s a small thing but it bugged me from the opening sequence, this slight physical hindrance that makes every grunt sound like it is battling against three layers of silicone glue. The movie starts in the middle of a revenge plot that everyone on screen seems to already understand better than the people paying for popcorn in the back row, plunging straight into the dust and neon of the National Capital Region without bothering to hand out maps. Director Akshat Ajay Sharma clearly wants us to feel the grit under our fingernails right away, throwing blood and grease at the camera lens as if quantity could somehow substitute for setup. Hindi movies have tried this specific brand of low-end gangster chic before, often mistaking shaking handheld cameras for actual momentum. Here, the style works just often enough to keep you from walking out during the first twenty minutes, though it relies heavily on the kind of aggressive color grading that makes every sunset look like an oil fire in a parking lot. Sharma and co-writer Adamya Bhalla have constructed a screenplay that owes a massive debt to Gangs of Wasseypur, except they forgot to give half the supporting characters any dialogue that isn't either a threat or an anatomical insult.

Siddiqui plays Haddi, a transgender woman who climbs through the ranks of the NCR criminal underworld with a mixture of quiet patience and sudden, jagged violence, though the film insists on calling her by her deadname for a stretch that feels unnecessarily protracted. His performance is fascinatingly lopsided, switching from a slumped, exhausted physical posture to moments of terrifying stillness where his eyes just completely go dead. You can see the exhaustion in his shoulders even when the script asks him to do things that require heavy suspension of disbelief, like beating three armed men to death with a rusted pipe while wearing an elaborate silk saree that never quite gets dirty enough. Resh Lamba brings an unsettling, quiet menace to the screen as one of the local fixers, moving through rooms like a shark in a flooded basement, while Ila Arun chews on the scenery with a terrifying authority that makes you wish she was in every single frame instead of just showing up when the plot needs someone to shout at a politician. Mohd. Zeeshan Ayyub shows up too, doing that thing he does where he looks perpetually disappointed by the state of modern governance and the quality of local tea. They are all working against an editing bay that seems terrified of letting a single beat linger, chopping up conversations with reaction shots that arrive a beat too late to mean anything.

The soundtrack leans heavily on low-end bass frequencies and traditional folk instruments run through a distortion pedal, a choice that works brilliantly for the tracking shots of motorcycles roaring through dusty highway underpasses at three in the morning. Then there is this one recurring flute motif that plays every time a character contemplates their difficult childhood, and if I'm heard it once, I heard it twelve times, always signaling the exact same emotional shift with the subtlety of a brick through a stained-glass window. Cinematographer Sahil Ansari captures the decaying splendor of abandoned industrial sites with a great deal of competence, though he clearly has a favorite lens flare that he deploys whenever the sun hits a rusted corrugated iron roof. The world-building around the transgender community feels half-baked in places, treating these complex social structures as little more than a convenient backdrop for a standard-issue revenge story about property acquisition and political graft. You get long stretches of dialogue in cramped, concrete-walled rooms where the audio mixing gets so muddy that half of Ila Arun’s threats are lost beneath the rumble of a passing diesel truck, which might be realistic for the locations they chose but makes following the financial machinations of local municipal elections nearly impossible.

Bollywood has always struggled to integrate queer narratives into its commercial machinery without flattening them into either tragic victims or comic relief, and Haddi sits somewhere in the uneasy middle of that spectrum. It wants to be an epic crime saga about systemic marginalization while also delivering the kind of head-stomping bone-breaks that play well in single-screen theaters outside of Mumbai. That friction between prestige social drama and trashy direct-to-video exploitation gives the middle hour a strange, lurching energy that never quite settles into a comfortable rhythm. Characters appear, deliver three lines of exposition explaining who cheated whom out of four crores in real estate development funds, and then get thrown off a balcony into a pile of gravel. It's not great, not bad, just there, churning through plot points with the mechanical efficiency of a dry-cleaning machine that’s missing a belt. The closing reels abandon all pretense of social realism and devolve into a chaotic bloodbath involving a burning car and a very long knife, resolving absolutely nothing about the institutional corruption that supposedly started the whole mess in the first place, which feels depressingly authentic to the genre.