There is a specific sound a cheap plastic ceiling fan makes when it is dying in a Kolkata rented room during July, a dry, clicking rattle that Pratim D. Gupta’s Saheb Bibi Golaam captures with an audio fidelity that almost made me wish I was wearing earplugs. If I'm honest, that sound stayed with me longer than most of the plot twists, grating against the eardrums every time the narrative needed to pivot into yet another dark alley of urban desperation.

Gupta directs with the kind of restless energy that usually gets mistaken for depth, shoving his camera into corners where it doesn't quite fit, tracking characters down narrow stairwells that smell of fried mustard oil and old cabbage. The screenplay divides itself into three distinct threads — a contract killer, an ambitious housewife, and a young aspiring model — intersecting in ways that feel both inevitable and slightly mechanical, like clockwork gears that have been forced together with a heavy pair of pliers after the teeth got slightly bent. You can see the structural scaffolding through the plaster in almost every scene, especially when the dialogue tries too hard to sound like real people talking over lukewarm tea but ends up sounding like a playwright trying to impress an audience that only shows up for the matinee.

Ritwick Chakraborty plays the hitman with his usual bag of twitchy, nervous mannerisms, smoking endless bidis and staring into the middle distance as if he forgot whether he left the gas burner on back home. He is good at playing ordinary men who have wandered into situations requiring a butcher's knife, a dynamic he perfected in Baishe Srabon without all the extra baggage this particular script saddles him with. Yet there is a stiffness to his interactions with his employers that feels less like professional detachment and more like an actor who read his lines three minutes before the director called action and never quite figured out what motivated his character to pick up a gun in the first place.

Then you have Damini Basu, who basically eats the entire movie in three bites and leaves everyone else chewing on scenery scraps. Her portrayal of the bored, frustrated housewife trapped in a high-rise apartment with a husband who treats her like an expensive piece of furniture is chilling precisely because she refuses to play it for cheap sympathy. She moves through her kitchen with a cold, terrifying precision, chopping vegetables as if she were planning a murder, which she sort of is, though the execution proves far messier than her domestic routines. When she sits on the bed staring at the ceiling fan with that flat, dead expression in her eyes, you stop noticing the way the boom mic dips just a fraction too low in the top left corner.

Vikram Chatterjee rounds out the trio as the idealistic young man mixed up in things way over his pay grade, though his storyline suffers from the sort of predictable trajectory that would feel right at home in average mainstream hindi movies where the handsome lead has to learn a hard lesson about the cruel city before the interval hits. His performance is earnest, occasionally too earnest, hitting every emotional beat with the subtlety of a brass band marching through a library. The cinematography by Gairik Sarkar tries to rescue these uneven narrative gears by drenching everything in murky blue and sickly amber tones that suggest nobody in this city has ever seen a direct ray of sunlight, relying on handheld movements that occasionally induce mild nausea rather than building tension.

The soundtrack features a recurring guitar riff that plays during every single transition between stories, and after the fourth or fifth time it appeared, I found myself actively groaning whenever the camera panned away from a face to show another damp brick wall while those same three notes started plucking away. It is a small thing, sure, but it wears you down long before the characters reach their respective destinations. The film wants to say something urgent about middle-class greed and moral decay in modern urban spaces, touching on themes that Bollywood movies usually gloss over with glossy songs and dance routines shot in Switzerland, but it gets bogged down in its own cynicism.

Everyone is miserable here, from the cops taking bribes to the victims begging for their lives, and after two hours of uninterrupted suffering, the bleakness stops feeling like a mirror held up to society and starts feeling like an exercise in endurance testing. You leave the theater or close the laptop screen with a faint headache, wondering if there was an actual point to all the blood and smoke beyond reminding us that bad things happen to desperate people in cramped apartments. There are moments of genuine cinematic power scattered across the runtime, mostly when Basu is on screen doing terrifying things with a laundry iron, but they are buried under layers of stylistic posturing that never quite adds up to a cohesive whole.