Ronit Roy’s jacket in the second half of Gumraah has this collar that keeps riding up whenever he turns his neck to interrogate someone, and honestly, that mechanical annoyance took up way more of my brainpower than it should have while I was watching a supposedly gripping murder mystery unfold.

Hindi cinema has a long and messy history with the procedural thriller, often borrowing heavily from Tamil and Telugu hits without quite knowing how to pace the stolen goods, and this particular entry is a remake of Thadam that arrives with all the glossy sheen and frantic cutting room energy we have come to expect from modern commercial Bollywood releases. Vardhan Ketkar makes his feature directorial debut here by taking a very simple premise—a man is brutally murdered in his own home, the cops find two identical suspects who have never met each other, and neither of them will confess—and somehow stretching it out across two and a half hours of aggressively lit interrogation rooms and screeching tires.

Aditya Roy Kapur plays the dual roles of Arjun and Ronnie, the lookalike pair sitting at the center of the chaos, and he actually manages the tricky distinction between a soft-spoken architect and a petty street con without relying entirely on fake mustaches or slouchy body language. He has this nervous energy in his eyes that works well for a guy who is perpetually caught on the wrong side of a very bad coincidence, though there are stretches where the script demands he look brooding and he just ends up staring blankly into the middle distance while the background score does all the heavy lifting.

Mrunal Thakur plays Inspector Shivani Mathur, the investigating officer who brings a stern, unsmiling intensity to a character that could have easily been written as a cardboard cutout of the tough-as-nails female cop we saw executed with a lot more grit in something like Drishyam. She wears oversized blazers and walks down sterile hallway floors with a heavy, deliberate click of her heels, but her performance suffers because she is constantly forced to deliver exposition as if she is reading out a grocery list to an unruly child.

Deepak Kalra and Keeya Khanna pop up in the supporting cast to fill out the procedural mechanics, providing the necessary false leads and frantic phone calls that keep the plot moving even when logic takes a temporary vacation, though nobody on screen looks entirely convinced about the alibis they are shouting across the room. The cinematography by Sameer Arya relies heavily on cool blue filters and dramatic overhead shots that make every single street in Mumbai look like a high-end commercial for luxury apartments, which drains the actual grit out of a story that is supposed to be rooted in lower-middle-class desperation and police brutality.

The soundtrack by Tanishk Bagchi and others drops in randomly right when the tension is starting to build, torpedoing the momentum with a romantic ballad that feels like it wandered in from an entirely different movie set in Switzerland. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time it happened.

Directorially, Ketkar tries to keep things moving by cutting between past flashbacks and present-day interrogations with a hyperactive frequency, making sure the audience never has a full minute to sit and actually think about the glaring plot holes involving fingerprints, CCTV footage, and basic police procedure. The screenplay tries to unravel the mystery of identity, class divide, and sibling resentment through a series of increasingly convoluted twists that pile on top of each other until the logic collapses under its own weight, leaving you wondering why nobody bothered to check the obvious security cameras outside the victim's apartment complex during the first ten minutes of the investigation.

Hindi movies often struggle with the balance between commercial crowd-pleasing elements and tight, logical storytelling, and Gumraah leans too hard into the commercial playbook whenever it needs to buy time before the next big reveal. Ronit Roy growls his way through every single scene with a folded pair of glasses in his hand, acting as the moral anchor of a department that seems to solve crimes entirely by shouting louder than the suspects.

When the film finally reaches its explanation-heavy climax, involving a convoluted childhood trauma and a predictable switcheroo, the emotional payoff feels earned only if you have completely turned off your brain about an hour prior. There is a version of this story that could have been a lean, mean ninety-minute cat-and-mouse game, but instead, we get lingering reaction shots of extras pretending to type furiously on keyboards while the lead actors argue about who was standing near a particular street vendor at two in the morning.

Aditya Roy Kapur puts in genuine effort to make the twin dynamic work without resorting to broad caricature, sweating through his shirts and looking genuinely terrified when the interrogation lights get turned up a little too high, which elevates the movie slightly above the standard direct-to-streaming clutter. Yet the picture as a whole remains aggressively average, neither offensive enough to walk out on nor clever enough to recommend to a friend who actually likes a well-constructed puzzle box.

You can see the gears turning behind every single scene, the writers frantically trying to cover up the tracks of the original Tamil script while tossing in extra action beats to keep the weekend matinee crowd awake through the post-interval slump. And that collar on Ronit Roy’s jacket just keeps riding up.