The sound design during the bicycle chain fight is just a fraction of a second too bright on the high end, which I swear makes the aluminum framing rattle in your teeth if you are sitting too close to the front speakers at a Saturday matinee. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time the metal whipped around a torso because you can practically hear the foley artist's knuckles brushing the floorboards of the studio. Not great, not bad, just there, yet it sets a certain tinny texture for Vasan Bala's second feature before the titles have even finished bleeding through the dirt.

You have to go back to Anurag Kashyap's early editing rooms to find someone this obsessed with the actual physical detritus of the city, the grey concrete dust that seems to coat every single exterior shot of Mumbai like dry flour. The narrative structure isn't so much a plot as a series of loose pockets stuffed with VHS tapes, comic books nobody bought in 1994, and old posters of Mithun Chakraborty that have faded into pale pink rectangles on the side of a pan shop. Bala directs like he is clearing out his childhood bedroom after his parents sold the house, throwing everything out the window just to see what bounces when it hits the asphalt. The camera never sits still, but it doesn't have that frantic, dizzying panic of a Paul Greengrass picture; instead, it rolls around like an over-caffeinated kid on a skateboard who refuses to use the sidewalk ramps.

Abhimanyu Dasani plays Surya, a boy who literally cannot feel physical pain due to a rare neurological quirk that everyone in the film explains using slightly different medical terms that sound made up. He has this permanent, slightly confused lurch to his posture, like he is trying to walk through a doorway that is three inches too low for his shoulders. When he gets kicked in the ribs by a goon wearing a fake leather jacket, Dasani doesn't do the traditional Bollywood grimace or the stoic superhero wince; he just blinks twice and looks down at his shoe as if he stepped in something wet. It's a remarkably low-key way to carry an action vehicle, especially when you consider how many of these guys spend six months in a Dubai gym just to learn how to flex their traps for the poster shoot. He shares these weird, quiet scenes with Riva Arora playing the younger version of the female lead, and they manage to avoid that terrifying precocious Disney-child energy that usually makes you want to slide under your seat until the credits roll.

Then Gulshan Devaiah shows up playing dual roles as a martial arts master with a glass eye and his deranged, chain-smoking brother, and the whole movie just sort of pivots on its heel and turns into a live-action cartoon drawn by someone who huffed too much model glue behind the bike sheds. Devaiah is chewing on his mustache so hard you can practically see the grease on his chin, but he finds this weirdly touching rhythm in the middle of all the wire-work and slapstick. It reminds me a bit of Nicolas Cage in Bad Lieutenant, that specific kind of committed insanity where the actor looks like they aren't entirely sure which country they are currently working in. The supporting cast features a bunch of faces you recognize from casting calls for local commercial spots playing thugs who get kicked through drywall, and nobody is trying to give an Oscar clip. They just show up, take the hit, and slide out of frame with their pants slightly torn at the knee.

The fight choreography by Eric Jacobus has this tactile, messy quality that makes you realize how bored you were by the weightless digital punching in most modern hindi films. Limbs bend in ways that look slightly wrong, furniture breaks too easily, and people get winded and have to lean against a washing machine for ten seconds before they can throw another punch. There are no grand orchestral swells during the brawls, just these jagged synth beats that sound like they were recorded on a Casio keyboard found in a damp basement in Lokhandwala. Sometimes the songs drop out halfway through a verse because the scene has already moved onto a different street corner, leaving the background actors standing around with nothing to do with their hands.

Beneath the genre pastiche and the constant stream of half-remembered pop culture references, the film is basically about the stubborn loneliness of people who consume too much junk culture before their brains are fully formed. Surya doesn't want to save the city or avenge his dead grandfather; he just wants to find the guy with the funny laugh who stole his favorite videotape of a bad eighties kickboxing movie. That smallness is either the best thing about the project or the reason it struggles to hold together once the novelty of the congenital analgesia premise wears off around the ninety-minute mark. Bollywood movies usually require a third-act speech about family honor or national pride to justify the ticket price, but this thing just ends with two exhausted people sitting on a curb sharing a stale packet of biscuits while traffic crawls past them in the rain.

There is a specific kind of lighting in the night scenes that looks less like professional cinematography and more like the sodium glow of an empty petrol station on the highway between Pune and Goa. It casts everything in this sickly orange wash that makes the skin tones look bruised even when the characters are supposed to be having a tender moment by a clothesline. It is hard to tell if the color grade was an artistic choice or just the result of a very tight post-production schedule where nobody had time to fix the mid-tones on the DI suite. Whatever the reason, it fits the mood of a picture that never looks quite expensive enough to be pretentious, yet possesses too much raw enthusiasm to be written off as a mere homage exercise.

The sound effects during the kitchen fight include a recurring squelch that sounds suspiciously like someone dropping a wet sponge onto linoleum, and after the fourth time it happens in five minutes, you start waiting for it like a drum beat. It's distracting in that specific way low-budget sound design often is when the director falls in love with one particular Foley quirk and refuses to let the editor turn it down in the mix. But then Radhika Madan jumps off a balcony and lands squarely on a stack of plastic crates with a massive, satisfying crack that makes you forget about the sponge entirely, or at least forgive it for existing in the first place.

Nobody in the audience during the screening I attended laughed at the jokes that were clearly written to be funny, but they cheered every time someone got thrown through a glass partition. That is probably the most honest reaction you could ask for from people who grew up watching late-night broadcasts of dubbed foreign action schlock on tired television sets with rabbit-ear antennas. The movie knows its audience isn't looking for a profound meditation on vigilante justice in contemporary hindi movies, just a couple of hours of people hitting each other with things they found lying around in a tenement courtyard. It doesn't overstay its welcome, which is more than you can say for ninety percent of the stuff coming out of the studios these days.

When the screen finally goes black, there is no grand emotional resonance hanging in the air, just the faint smell of popcorn and the sound of the guy in the row behind you checking his WhatsApp messages. It's a modest little thing that will probably live out its days on late-night streaming algorithms where people stumble across it by accident at three in the morning and wonder why they never heard about it when it was in theaters. That feels about right for a movie that treats its own plot points like discarded receipts you find in your pocket three days after you went to the market.