The sound design is genuinely obnoxious during those early college football sequences, every boot hitting leather somehow engineered to rattle the fillings in your molars. Sandeep Reddy Vanga loves audio that punches you straight in the ear, and if I'm honest, it sets a nerve-grating tone that never quite lets up for the next three hours. We are dropped immediately into the aggressive orbit of Kabir Singh, a surgical resident with a legendary temper and a penchant for breaking hands on the rugby pitch. He is volatile from frame one, yelling at subordinates and smashing hospital equipment because things didn't go his way in the OR. This isn't your standard Hindi cinema hero introduction with a choreographed fight or a swelling patriotic anthem, but rather a greasy-haired lunatic screaming obscenities in a locker room. Shahid Kapoor plays him with a permanent snarl that suggests he hasn't slept in a week and has a pocketful of uppers he bought behind the canteen.

Kiara Advani plays Preeti, the junior student who wanders into this hurricane and somehow decides she wants to live right in the eye of it. Their romance is built almost entirely on intimidation, territorial dominance, and long stretches where nobody says a damn word while staring intensely across a courtyard. Vanga shoots their initial interactions like a nature documentary about a predator sizing up an exceptionally quiet antelope. She has about four lines of dialogue in the first forty minutes, which mostly function as prompts for him to establish ownership over her timetable, her friends, and her academic department. It is exhausting to watch because the film expects us to buy this as a grand, sweeping passion rather than a restraining order waiting to happen. Kapoor leans into the madness with terrifying commitment, storming around the campus with a stride that tells you he owns the concrete he walks on, barking orders at anyone who looks at his girl sideways. When her father rejects him for being a drunken, violent menace, Kabir doesn't negotiate or plead his case like a normal human being, choosing instead to demand that she make a decision within six hours or he will destroy everything.

The screenplay takes a sharp, nose-diving turn into self-pity once the separation happens and Kabir retreats to his family estate to pickle his liver in high-end scotch. This is where the movie threatens to derail completely, dragging us through a prolonged bender of intravenous drug use, dead-eyed patients, and furious orgies with terrified actresses who mostly exist to look bewildered while he cries about his ex. Kapoor is astonishingly good at looking like absolute garbage. His skin gets grey, his beard turns into a rat's nest, and his eyes bulge with the frantic desperation of a junkie who just realized the stash is empty. It is a performance that demands you look away, yet you keep staring because the sheer velocity of his self-destruction is mesmerizing. Soham Majumdar shows up as Shiva, the loyal best friend who sticks around through the cocaine-fueled tantrums and the drunken surgeries, serving as the audience's proxy for exasperated disbelief. Shiva gets some of the best reactions in the film, particularly a moment in a hotel room where he just watches Kabir vomit into a basin with a look of profound, exhausted regret that feels entirely earned. Yet the narrative keeps finding ways to excuse the carnage, framing his descent not as the logical consequence of a broken brain, but as a tragic epic of a man whose love was simply too massive for the world to handle.

Cinematographer Santhana Krishnan Ravichandran keeps the camera glued to Shahid’s face, tracking his angry pacing through sterile hospital corridors and sun-drenched courtyards with a relentless Steadicam that rarely stops moving. The visual language relies heavily on extreme close-ups of bloodshot eyes, syringes being prepped, and bottles shattering against tiled floors, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere that mirrors Kabir's fractured mental state. It looks expensive and slick, the kind of polished aesthetic typical of modern commercial hindi movies that want to look gritty without actually getting any real dirt under their fingernails. The soundtrack works overtime to tell you how to feel during every single scene, deploying heavy guitar riffs whenever Kabir does something rebellious and sweeping string arrangements the second he looks pensively out a rain-streaked window. Harshavardhan Rameshwar's score is loud and omnipresent, practically begging the audience to weep for a man who is actively terrorizing everyone unfortunate enough to share a room with him. There's a recurring theme song that kicks in during the drug-addled stupor scenes which sounds suspiciously like a slowed-down track from Rockstar, and after the fourth time it drops over a slow-motion montage of a man crying into a pillow, it starts to wear out its welcome.

What makes the movie fascinating, and deeply uncomfortable to sit through, is the way it refuses to soften its protagonist for mass consumption. Kabir remains selfish, abusive, and utterly insufferable all the way through the third act, barking at his elderly grandmother and treating his loyal domestic help like furniture. We have seen plenty of bad boys in bollywood movies over the decades, but they usually get a redemption arc involving a dying mother or a reformed criminal syndicate that makes their bad behavior palatable. Kabir doesn't reform in any meaningful sense; he just gets tired of being sad and decides to bully his way back into a normal life once he discovers there's a baby on the way. The supporting cast populates the background with varying degrees of success, though the actress playing the maid has a dubbed voice that sounds entirely detached from her physical performance, a minor technical glitch that kept pulling me out of the drama every time she yelled at him to eat his soup.

The second half slows down to a miserable crawl as Kabir isolates himself in a Mumbai penthouse with a dog that looks perpetually concerned about the production values. Vanga directs with a stubborn refusal to compromise on his character's toxic worldview, shooting the domestic violence episodes with the same operatic seriousness he brings to the surgical scenes. It forces a reaction out of you, whether that reaction is outrage, boredom, or a strange sort of morbid fascination with how far the narrative is willing to push its antihero before he hits rock bottom. Kapoor carries the whole enterprise on his bruised and tattooed shoulders, matching the manic energy of Ranbir Kapoor in Animal years before that film even went into production, though here the stakes feel smaller and infinitely more pathetic. When the credits finally roll, there is no grand moral lesson waiting at the end, just an exhausted silence and a lingering sense that you have just spent three hours watching a very talented, very angry man throw a massive, expensive tantrum.