Ruslaan Mumtaz wears a leather jacket in this film that appears to have been sized for a completely different human being, bunching up around his shoulders in a way that suggests the costume department grabbed the first thing off the rack and prayed for wide angles. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every time he leaned against a wall to brood. We are meant to be tracking the emotional fallout of a modern romance gone sideways, a digital age disaster involving leaked MMS clips and shattered reputations, but my eyes kept getting snagged on the shoulder pads. Bollywood movies have rarely known what to do with the messy, unglamorous panic of a genuine digital scandal, usually opting for glossy melodrama over actual psychological grit, and this one stumbles into that exact trap about five minutes in and never quite figures its way back out.

Aman Sachdeva directs with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer aimed at a glass figurine, shoving the camera right up into his actors' nostrils whenever a tear is called for. There is no room to breathe in these frames, no background detail to ground the melodrama, just a relentless parade of tight close-ups and swirling crane shots that feel leftover from a television soap opera budget. The screenplay by whoever happened to be sitting in the room that Tuesday is a mess of stilted dialogue that nobody would ever say out loud to another living person, especially not teenagers dealing with the horrific fallout of a viral video. They speak in press releases and Hallmark card margins. It reminded me a bit of Ram Gopal Varma’s Nishabd, minus the aesthetic discipline and the sheer willingness to sit in the squirmy discomfort of its own premise. Here, every character has a ready-made moral speech primed and loaded for the exact second someone needs to look disappointed.

Chetna Pande tries, lord knows she tries, to anchor the central tragedy of a young woman whose life is dismantled by malice and bad Wi-Fi, but she is repeatedly betrayed by an editing bay that seems to have lost its collective mind. She will deliver a genuinely affecting moment of quiet panic, staring blankly at a blank wall, only for the director to cut away to a completely unnecessary flashback of her laughing on a beach six months prior just in case we forgot they were happy once. It is exhausting. Murali Sharma shows up as the obligatory stern father figure, playing the role with his arms permanently crossed over his chest like a human tollbooth. He has two modes in hindi films, shouting and looking severely out of a window, and he cycles through both with maximum efficiency.

The soundtrack leans heavily on acoustic guitars that sound like they were recorded in a bathroom stall across the street from the studio. Every single emotional beat is underlined, highlighted, and circled in red ink by a score that refuses to let a single scene exist in silence. If a character looks sad, the strings weep. If a character looks angry, a rogue electric guitar chord drops out of nowhere to let you know the stakes have apparently escalated. It’s an old school Bollywood trick that feels deeply out of place in a story trying to tackle the modern internet age, where cruelty is usually quiet, cold, and entirely devoid of string sections.

As for the themes, the film attempts a sort of cautionary tale about the dangers of technology and the viciousness of the youth, but its moral compass is completely broken. It wants to condemn the voyeurism of the internet while simultaneously lingering on shots that objectify its female lead under the guise of artistic tragedy. You cannot wag your finger at the audience for consuming gossip while your camera is actively drooling over the very spectacle you claim to be critiquing. It makes for a very strange viewing experience, one where you spend half your time rolling your eyes at the hypocrisy and the other half wondering if that leather jacket ever gets dry-cleaned.

Hindi movies have tackled youth culture and cyber-bullying with far more grace in the past, finding nuance in the grey areas where teenagers actually live and make terrible mistakes. This picture prefers neon lights, screaming matches in rainstorms, and resolutions that arrive via convenient confession rather than hard earned growth. It’s not great, not bad, just there, floating in the endless ether of forgotten releases that populate late-night cable slots. When the credits finally roll, nobody has learned anything, least of all the filmmakers.