That particular shade of synthetic turquoise on the office divider kept distracting me throughout the first half hour of Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare, which is probably not what Alankrita Shrivastava intended when she set up her brightly lit call-center cubes. You sit there watching Bhumi Pednekar barking English phrases into a headset while her supervisor looms over her shoulder, and your eyes just drift to the cheap laminate or the flickering fluorescent tube that needs a new starter. It’s a small thing, sure, but it bugs me when movies spend half their energy telling you how gritty and real their outer-Delhi housing societies are while the background details look like they were thrown together by an intern with a mood board and a budget. Not great, not bad, just there.

Shrivastava has this way of directing actors where she wants every scene to feel like it’s happening on the edge of a panic attack, which works wonders for about forty minutes before it starts wearing out your nerves. The screenplay bounces between two cousins living in Greater Noida, a place that exists mostly as a monument to broken real estate promises and dusty highways where nobody ever seems to reach where they are going on time. Konkona Sen Sharma plays Radha, the older cousin who has already signed her life away to a dutiful marriage and two kids, staring at her phone like it might bite her while her husband watches cricket with the sound too loud. Then there’s Kajal, played by Pednekar with a lot of loud prints and even louder ambitions, sneaking out for dates she finds on dating apps that promise everything and deliver very sweaty men in hatchbacks. The dialogue hits you with these jagged little sentences that sound like actual arguments you’ve overheard in a shared cab rather than polished lines written in a quiet room, though sometimes the characters drop into expositional speeches about female autonomy that feel pasted on from a completely different draft.

Sen Sharma does this thing with her shoulders when her character is trying to suppress her own anger that tells you everything you need to know without a single word of voiceover. She’s essentially playing a variation of the housewife she played in Konkona's previous film, Lipstick Under My Burkha, but she finds new ways to look trapped inside her own kitchen, her fingers nervously picking at the laminate of the dining table while her husband explains why she shouldn't take that night-shift job. It’s an interior, bruised kind of performance that holds the whole sagging middle section of the picture together when the plot starts wandering into repetitive cycles of domestic shouting matches and late-night Metro rides. Pednekar has a harder time because her character is written as a bundle of unfiltered desires rather than a person, rushing from one misadventure to the next with an aggressive energy that never quite settles down long enough for you to feel her actual fear. Still, when the two of them share a quiet moment on a balcony eating stale biscuits and complaining about their respective men, you forget about the heavy-handed symbolism and just watch two actors who know how to occupy the same frame without stepping on each other's toes.

Vikrant Massey shows up as the delivery boy with dreams of a better life, and he plays it with that same mournful, puppy-dog earnestness that made him so good in A Death in the Gunj, though here he gets stuck playing a romantic ideal rather than a person with any real edges. The supporting cast is packed with actors who clearly know the ins and outs of Delhi side streets, even if the camera often treats them like props to be moved around whenever the narrative needs a burst of local color or an excuse for a street fight. Cinematographer Akshay Singh shoots the nocturnal scenes with a muddy, neon-heavy palette that makes the outer-ring expressways look less like modern development and more like concrete trenches dug by people who gave up on happiness years ago. There’s a recurring electronic track that kicks in every time someone makes a rebellious choice, and after the fourth time it blared through the sound mix, I found myself actively rooting for someone to just stay home and watch television in silence.

The movie wants to talk about sexual liberation in the suburbs, which sounds great on paper and occasionally results in genuinely funny scenes where women fumble their way through modern dating without a manual, but it also falls back on every easy cliché about patriarchal oppression you can find in contemporary hindi films. Every man in the story outside of Massey’s sweet-natured courier is either a brute, a hypocrite, or a useless lump who expects his dinner served the second he walks through the door, leaving no room for nuance in the domestic dynamics. Hindi movies have been trying to unpack the hypocrisy of the middle-class family for decades, and while Shrivastava brings a specific female gaze to the mess, she often settles for broad caricature just when the material demands a bit of psychological messiness. You see the plot points coming from three kilometers away, especially once the cousinly bond starts healing through shared cigarettes and late-night confessions that feel engineered to hit specific emotional beats for festival audiences.

By the time the narrative stumbles toward its predictable conclusion involving a solidarity march and a reclaimed sense of self, the emotional momentum has mostly leaked out of the tires. It’s an ambitious mess of a project, swinging wildly between sharp satirical observations about modern urban isolation and broad melodrama that belongs in a much cheaper soap opera. The production design department clearly spent a lot of time finding the right kind of peeling wallpaper for those cramped bedrooms, but they couldn't figure out how to give the story a shape that doesn't feel like two different short films stitched together with duct tape and good intentions. There are moments of genuine cinematic bravery scattered throughout, usually whenever Sen Sharma is allowed to just sit quietly in a room and look miserable without someone explaining why she has every right to be. Everything else feels like homework assigned by a well-meaning professor who forgot that entertainment needs to breathe before it can preach.