That one needle drop happens at least four times in the first two episodes alone, and it's a moody indie guitar track that starts to feel less like atmosphere and more like a heavy-handed cue telling you exactly how to feel when the characters are just standing around smoking on balconies.

Beibojazzy or whatever, let's just get into Taish, which came to ZEE5 as a six-part web series before getting chopped up into a feature-length film format, though if I'm honest, the feature version feels like watching someone's heavily annotated wedding video where everyone is intensely angry about things that happened ten years ago.

Director Bejoy Nambiar has always had a certain aesthetic gravity, a visual vocabulary that leans heavily into saturated lighting, lingering close-ups, and non-linear timelines that occasionally threaten to collapse under their own weight, much like he did back when he made Shaitan. Here, the story splits between two parallel tracks involving violent revenge, weddings in picturesque British countryside manors, and men with severe emotional dysregulation who solve their problems by punching glass or staring menacingly into car wing mirrors.

Pulkit Samrat plays Sunny, a loose cannon who arrives at a destination wedding with a chip on his shoulder the size of a Dorset cliff, wearing leather jackets indoors and shouting dialogue that sounds like it was written during an intense bout of insomnia. He brings a raw, jittery energy to the screen, though he occasionally crosses that fine line from compellingly unhinged to exhausting, especially when the script asks him to carry entire emotional arcs through clenched jaws and heavy breathing.

Opposite him, Harshvardhan Rane takes on the role of Pali, a brooding mobster associated with a local syndicate, and he spends most of his screen time looking like he desperately needs a nap and a hug, which works surprisingly well for the character's internal conflict. Rane has this physical stillness that anchors the chaotic editing around him, giving his scenes an unexpected weight even when the plot dips into standard gangster melodrama tropes.

Then there is Jim Sarbh, who plays Rohan, the groom's hyper-articulate best friend who is just trying to keep the peace while dealing with his own fracturing psyche, bringing a manic, cerebral charm to a cast that is otherwise mostly just yelling and breaking things. Sarbh has this incredible ability to make even the most exposition-heavy dialogue sound completely improvised, sliding between British-accented casualness and sudden, terrifying vulnerability without missing a beat.

The cinematography by Gairik Sarkar deserves a lot of credit for making rural England look genuinely menacing, trading the usual tourist-board greens and golds for dusty, washed-out tones that mirror the moral rot eating away at these people. The camera moves with a nervous urgency, tracking characters through narrow hallways and crowded banquet tents with handheld fluidity, though there are moments where the hyper-stylized color grading feels a bit like an Instagram filter left on max settings.

Hindi films have often struggled to balance glossy production values with genuine character grit, usually leaning too hard into either pristine studio gloss or muddy indie realism, but Taish sits in a weird middle ground that feels distinctively Nambiar-esque. It is loud, messy, and structurally ambitious, jumping backward and forward in time to show how a single violent encounter at a gas station can unravel two entirely different social circles over the course of a wedding weekend.

The sound design is aggressive, layering background hums, screeching tires, and sudden drops in score to manufacture tension where the dialogue might be lagging behind, which can get a bit grating by the time the third episode rolls around. A supporting actor in the London mob subplot has clearly been dubbed by someone in a Mumbai studio whose voice doesn't match the heavy physical frame on screen, and once you notice the sync issue, it's impossible to unsee.

Violence in these types of contemporary bollywood movies usually serves as a quick narrative shortcut to establish danger, but here it has consequences that ripple outward and ruin lives in messy, unglamorous ways, even if the characters still manage to look impeccably styled while bleeding on expensive carpets. The screenplay deals with the heavy burden of past trauma and the stupid things men do to protect their fragile egos, exploring how a cycle of retaliation can consume entire families before anyone even stops to ask why they started fighting in the first place.

Sanjivay, the fictional syndicate boss hovering at the edge of the narrative, functions more as a looming concept than an actual character, which keeps the focus tightly locked on the younger men whose reckless choices are driving the catastrophe. The female characters get a bit sidelined in the crossfire, mostly existing to cry, plead, or look disappointed while the boys smash things up, a recurring issue in stories that get too obsessed with toxic masculinity as an aesthetic choice.

By the time the bullets start flying during the climax, the narrative momentum has stuttered and stalled through too many flashbacks and lingering reaction shots, turning what should have been a tense showdown into a chore to finish. It's a frustrating watch because the raw ingredients for something genuinely sharp are all right there on the table, buried beneath stylistic excess and pacing issues that make six episodes feel like twelve.

Hindi movies need more filmmakers willing to take structural risks like this one, even if the execution leaves you shaking your head at the sheer volume of style over substance. You walk away remembering individual moments—a tense conversation over breakfast, a sudden burst of violence in a quiet kitchen, a very tired Jim Sarbh rubbing his temples—rather than a cohesive whole that holds up to serious scrutiny.