The corpse is missing from the morgue, and honestly, the police procedure that follows looks less like a proper investigation and more like an excuse to put two men in a room together and let them glare through cigar smoke. Jeethu Joseph directed the Spanish original this is based on, The Body, and while that earlier film had a certain clinical chill to it, this Hindi adaptation feels sweatier, more prone to sudden bursts of background noise that make you wonder if the sound mixer fell asleep on the fader. Rishi Kapoor plays a veteran cop with a permanent sneer and an irritating habit of sucking on hard candies during murder interrogations, which is a small thing that bugged me the whole time because you can hear the plastic clacking against his molars every time he tries to deliver a dramatic line. He spends the night matching wits with Emraan Hashmi, who plays a younger, wealthier chemist suspected of bumping off his corporate powerhouse wife. The screenplay takes place entirely inside a cavernous, poorly lit forensic facility during a raging thunderstorm, because apparently no one in this fictional universe believes in paying for backup or turning on the overhead lights when a cadaver goes walkabout. It is a locked-room mystery that keeps opening new doors just to show you another empty hallway, which gets exhausting about forty minutes in when you realize half the flashbacks are just repeating the same arguments with different curtains.

Emraan Hashmi has spent a good chunk of his career playing guys who look perpetually exhausted by their own bad decisions, and this role fits him like a worn leather jacket he forgot he owned. He doesn't stretch much here, but he has this specific way of widening his eyes and swallowing hard when he is cornered that works well enough for pulp thrillers. Sobhita Dhulipala plays the murdered wife with a sharp, brittle arrogance that makes her entirely believable as the kind of person who would buy a pharmaceutical conglomerate and then treat her husband like an errant intern, though her screen time is mostly chopped up into hyper-stylized memories where she wears dramatic silk robes and drinks scotch in slow motion. The real friction, however, comes from the pairing of Hashmi and Kapoor, an old-school versus new-school dynamic that doesn't feel manufactured so much as slightly rusty. Kapoor isn't doing anything he hasn't done in a dozen other Kapoor and Sons type pictures where he plays the grumpy elder, but his timing remains sharp enough to catch Hashmi off guard during their long, looping conversations about poison and infidelity. They pace around aluminum autopsy tables while the rain hammers the roof, trading accusations that grow increasingly convoluted as the night drags on toward dawn.

The cinematography by Ravichandran leans heavily into icy blue filters and wet pavement reflections, giving the whole enterprise the visual texture of a direct-to-video rental from 2004. Every time a character remembers an argument, the color palette desaturates until it looks like a photocopy of a photocopy, which gets a bit tiresome when it happens five times in the same twenty-minute stretch. Then there is the soundtrack, composed by a rotating committee of people who clearly believed that silence was a personal insult to the ticket-buying public. A generic piano motif keeps dropping in every time someone looks suspiciously at a medicine bottle, and it repeats so often you can practically set your watch by the cue. Hindi movies have long had a complicated relationship with background scores that insist on telling the audience how to feel, but this one takes it to an almost comical extreme, drowning out subtle line readings with thundering cellos that belong in a period epic rather than a talky thriller set in a basement. It is loud, obvious, and constantly reminding you that you are watching a movie instead of just letting the tension build on its own.

Beneath the genre machinery and the endless supply of flashbacks, the film is essentially an extended study in petty revenge and the exhausting nature of toxic marriages. The characters are all terrible people doing terrible things to each other over corporate shares and extramarital affairs, which keeps things moderately entertaining even when the logic starts to fray around the edges. It is a story about hubris and the foolish belief that you can outsmart a grieving family member or a bored detective who has nothing better to do on a rainy Tuesday night. The narrative structure relies entirely on withholding key information until the very last possible second, a trick that works twice before you start noticing the plot holes big enough to drive an ambulance through. There is a compulsive, trashy energy to the proceedings that separates it from more prestigious thrillers, recalling something like Abbas-Mustan's Race without quite matching that film's gleeful commitment to total nonsense. You watch it not because you expect high art, but because you want to see how tangled the web can get before someone finally confesses.

The twist ending arrives with the subtlety of a falling safe, upending everything you thought you knew about the missing corpse and the dynamics between the grieving widower and the dead woman. Some viewers will probably throw their hands up at the sheer improbability of it all, while others will appreciate the sheer brass neck required to pull off such a wildly convoluted explanation in the final ten minutes. It is a neat magic trick that falls apart the moment you walk out of the theater and start thinking about the timeline, but while it is actually playing out on screen, it holds your attention through sheer momentum. Kapoor gets one last hard-candy crunch in before the credits roll, a nice little punctuation mark on a performance that deserved a tighter, less frantic movie to inhabit. Bollywood has certainly produced far slicker suspense dramas over the years, yet there is a stubbornly old-fashioned pleasure in watching a star-driven thriller that refuses to take itself too seriously while still executing its pulpy mechanics with a straight face.