Sekhar Suman wears a lot of hats in Heartless, but the one that fits the worst is director, which is probably why the opening fifteen minutes feel less like an introduction to a dramatic feature and more like an extended commercial for high-end real estate in Dubai. Aditya Singh is young, wealthy, arrogant in that specific way only children of inherited privilege manage without ever looking like they earned it, and suffering from a bad heart that requires an immediate transplant. Adhyayan Suman plays this walking billboard for designer cardigans with a glazed, somewhat distant expression that suggests he would rather be anywhere else on the planet, which oddly enough suits a character whose ticker is about to give out. We get the usual establishing scenes of fast cars, penthouse apartments, and a glowing girlfriend played by Ariana Ayam who exists primarily to gaze at him with unblinking devotion while wearing outfits that cost more than my first car. It is a slow, bloated start that drags its feet through mud, establishing a rhythm that is neither fast enough to be trashy fun nor slow enough to warrant the dramatic weight it keeps trying to hoist onto its own shoulders. If I'm honest, the entire setup feels like a vanity project that somehow got funded by someone who lost a bet, complete with glossy lighting that makes every hospital corridor look like a boutique hotel lobby where nobody actually gets sick.

The premise finally kicks into gear once Aditya is wheeled into the operating theater for his heart transplant, and this is where the movie borrows heavily from Awake, that lesser-known thriller starring Hayden Christensen where the patient goes under the knife while remaining fully conscious. He can hear the doctors talking, he feels the cold steel cutting into his chest, and he discovers a conspiracy among the surgical staff that makes his impending death look less like a medical failure and more like a targeted assassination. Deepti Naval and Om Puri show up as the seasoned doctors who bring a sudden, jarring level of competence to the screen, reminding everyone else in the room how actual acting works through mere posture and vocal cadence. Their scenes possess a grounded gravity that the rest of the production simply cannot match, no matter how many dramatic strings the orchestra scrapes in the background. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how the heart monitor sounds like a generic stock audio effect downloaded from a free website rather than an actual medical device, flattening the tension right when the protagonist is supposed to be terrified of flatlining on the table.

Adhyayan Suman struggles when the narrative demands genuine panic, defaulting to a wide-eyed stare that reads less like mortal terror and more like someone who forgot whether they turned the stove off before leaving home. He has moments of quiet effectiveness during the hospital bed sequences where he doesn't have to move much, letting the heavy makeup and pale lighting do the heavy lifting for him. Ariana Ayam, meanwhile, navigates her role with a kind of porcelain stiffness that occasionally works for the melodramatic tone of Hindi movies but frequently leaves her stranded during dialogue exchanges that require a pulse of their own. She is gorgeous on camera, photographed with soft-focus lenses that make her look like she's stepping out of a high-end shampoo commercial every time she enters a room, but the chemistry between the two leads is practically nonexistent. They look like two strangers thrown together by a casting director who met them both five minutes before the cameras started rolling, reading their lines with a polite distance that drains the romance of any actual heat.

The cinematography by R. M. Swamy leans heavily into blues and grays during the medical sequences before exploding into sun-drenched yellows the moment the narrative shifts back to Dubai's outdoor locations, giving the entire picture a schizophrenic visual palette that never settles on a unified mood. The soundtrack, composed by Gaurav Dagaonkar with lyrics by Arafat Mahmood, features a couple of romantic ballads that materialize out of nowhere, halting the narrative momentum dead in its tracks just so the actors can pose against various balconies in slow motion. That main love theme gets recycled at least four times across the running time, playing during flashbacks, playing during current emotional beats, and even playing as background instrumental muzak in a hotel lobby scene, which feels lazy even for mainstream Bollywood. You start waiting for that specific piano cue to drop because you know it means another five minutes of dialogue-free montage where characters stare wistfully into the middle distance while the wind blows through their hair with suspicious theatricality.

Beneath the glossy veneer and the medical thriller mechanics, the film wants to explore themes of betrayal, the limits of familial obligation, and how wealth insulates people from the messy realities of mortality. These ideas float around the periphery like dust motes caught in a projector beam, never quite landing with enough force to make the viewer care about the moral dilemmas facing the supporting cast. Shekhar Suman paces his scenes with an erratic hand, sometimes lingering on a reaction shot for three beats too long until the dramatic tension evaporates into awkward silence, then rushing through crucial plot reveals so fast you barely have time to process who is betraying whom. It is a messy affair that never quite figures out whether it wants to be a medical conspiracy potboiler or a sweeping romantic melodrama, crashing its tone against the rocks every twenty minutes or so.

There is an ambition here that deserves some kind of acknowledgment, even if the execution constantly trips over its own shoelaces and falls flat on its face in the hallway. Hindi films have long flirted with high-concept thriller plots borrowed from Western cinema, and adapting the conscious-during-surgery trope into a local framework with family dynamics thrown into the mix isn't a bad idea on paper. But paper doesn't bleed, and actors need more than a slick wardrobe and a couple of dramatic monologue cues to make a preposterous plot feel grounded in human emotion. When the credits finally roll, you are left with the distinct impression of a film that spent ninety percent of its budget on plane tickets to Dubai and the remaining ten percent on a script that needed at least two more passes in the writers' room before anyone yelled action.