Akshaye Khanna’s hair has this weird, aggressive salt-and-pepper thing going on in Mom that I kept staring at instead of listening to his dialogue during the first twenty minutes. It is a small thing, but it bugged me because Matthew Mathew — yes, that is his character’s actual name, which sounds like someone panicked during a script read-through and just doubled down — spends a lot of screen time leaning against car doors looking world-weary while sporting what appears to be aggressively frosted sideburns. Ravi Udyawar directs this mess with the kind of glossy, neon-lit earnestness usually reserved for high-end detergent commercials, where every single rain drop hits a windshield like it has personal business to settle with the passenger inside. We are dropped immediately into a Delhi that looks less like a real metropolis and more like a heavily filtered mood board designed to induce a low-grade migraine, all blue-tinted shadows and orange streetlamps glowing through haze machines that must have been rented by the gross.

Sridevi plays Devki, a biology teacher who lives in a house so quiet and pristine it feels like a museum exhibit dedicated to domestic tranquility before the plot kicks in. Her stepdaughter Arya, played with a sullen, teenage opacity by Sajal Aly, goes to a Valentine’s Day party and makes the mistake of ignoring a spoiled brat whose mother happens to own a local political machine or something equally convenient for narrative escalation. The assault that follows is handled with the usual blunt-force trauma we have come to expect from commercial Hindi films tackling sexual violence, meaning the camera averts its gaze just enough to stay in the safe zone of censorship while still letting the audience revel in the ugly mechanics of victimization. It is brutal, sure, but it is also terribly familiar, borrowing heavily from the structural beats of Neeraj Pandey's A Wednesday without possessing that movie's lean, cynical structural machinery.

What saves the middle stretch from collapsing into a standard-issue vigilante slog is Sridevi herself, who does things with her facial muscles that most actors reserve for shouting matches. She doesn’t cry much; instead, she just lets her eyes go flat, developing a terrifyingly blank stare that suggests someone has pulled the plug on her internal wiring while leaving the motor running. When she hires Matthew Khanna’s disgraced cop-turned-private-investigator to help her gather evidence the local police refuse to touch, their scenes together crackle with a strange, tired chemistry. They are both too old and too exhausted for this revenge fantasy, which gives their clandestine meetings in dingy parking lots a weary flavor. The script, credited to Girish Kohli, forces them to speak in these weirdly formal declarative sentences that nobody in actual Delhi has ever uttered, but they manage to deliver them with straight faces.

Adnan Siddiqui plays the biological father who stands around the periphery wringing his hands and looking appropriately devastated without ever getting anything substantial to do. He is essentially human furniture, wheeled into frame whenever the plot needs someone to ask obvious questions or cry softly into a kitchen towel while Sridevi is out buying illegal surveillance gear or poisoning a rapist's protein shake. It is a thankless gig, and he plays it with a kind of dignified confusion that feels entirely genuine. Nawazuddin Siddiqui turns up later as a shady detective with a fake eye and a limp, chewing the scenery with such manic enthusiasm that you half expect him to start barking at the furniture. He brings a weird, lived-in grease to the proceedings that momentarily lifts the film out of its sterile, ad-agency aesthetic, though his character’s motivations make almost zero sense if you pause to think about them for more than five seconds.

The cinematography by Anuj Rakesh Dhawan relies so heavily on slow motion that characters spend half their lives walking toward or away from exploding vehicles and rain-slicked intersections at the speed of drifting tectonic plates. Every time someone opens a car door, the camera swoops in from a low angle as if a deity were descending to check the tire pressure. A.R. Rahman’s score pulses underneath all this visual gymnastics, pumping out heavy synth bass lines and moody vocal tracks that occasionally threaten to turn the movie into a music video for a band that broke up in 2011. It’s not great, not bad, just there, functioning as sonic wallpaper to cover up the gaping logic holes where the police investigation ought to be.

Bollywood movies have a long, tedious history of turning vigilante justice into a middle-class moral sedative, letting audiences cheer for extrajudicial murder without having to think about actual judicial reform. Mom participates in this tradition eagerly, wrapping its bloodless vengeance in soft-focus domesticity and shots of Sridevi looking noble while standing next to a kitchen counter. Yet, watching a legendary performer tear through a mediocre script with such cold, calculated fury offers its own peculiar brand of entertainment. She doesn't give you a character arc; she gives you a weather event, moving through the plot like a slow-moving front that strips the paint off every house it passes. By the time the climax arrives in a remote, fog-choked farmhouse, the plot mechanics have become so absurd that you just have to lean back and watch the carnage unfold without asking why nobody called the CBI.

There is a recurring problem with the sound design where background traffic noises cut out the exact second a character stops speaking, leaving this hollow, dead silence that reminds you you are watching people pretend in a studio lot in Mumbai rather than a real street in the capital. It's a small thing that happens repeatedly during the second act, pulling you right out of the illusion just as the tension is supposed to be peaking. Sridevi deserved a better movie for her three-hundredth appearance, something with actual teeth instead of polished plastic fangs. Still, watching her quietly dismantle a room full of corrupt cops with nothing more than a chemical sample kit and a flat glare remains oddly satisfying long after the credits have faded to black.