That one tracking shot where Shreyas Talpade tries to look threatening while holding a cold cup of tea really tells you everything about Teen Thay Bhai, a movie that never quite figures out if it wants to be a broad family farce or a bitter little property dispute in the middle of nowhere. If I'm honest, the tea was probably lukewarm when they shot it, but it's the kind of tiny detail that sticks in your head long after the plot mechanics have dissolved into the humid air of a forgotten Punjab. Om Puri, who could usually play a telephone directory and make you care about the binding, walks through this material with the exhausted stride of a man who just remembered he left his oven on back in Mumbai. He plays the eldest brother, or maybe the middle one, because the script by Mrighdeep Singh Lamba and Rahul Singh is so structurally slippery that bloodlines barely seem to matter once the yelling gets started. They are three estranged siblings forced to share a crumbling ancestral mansion under the bizarre terms of a dead grandfather's will, which sounds like an old play you might have suffered through in college and frankly feels even rustier here. The director, Mrigdeep Singh Lamba before he found his groove with Fukrey, stages these domestic brawls with the kind of frantic coverage that usually indicates nobody quite trusted the actors to hold a two-shot without checking their watches.

Hindi films have a long and dusty tradition of men screaming at each other in courtyards while various aunts and neighbors hang laundry in the background, but this particular entry feels oddly weightless, floating somewhere between a television sketch and a theatrical release that lost its nerve halfway through the edit. The comedy relies heavily on people repeating each other's names with rising inflection, a tic that makes Deepak Dobriyal look occasionally stranded despite his usual knack for stealing scenes with just a twitch of his eyebrow or an unfortunate vest. He plays the youngest sibling with a desperate kind of energy, sweating through polyester shirts that look like they haven't seen a washing machine since the previous monsoon. Ragni Khanna, stepping into the thankless role of the woman who must anchor all this testosterone to some semblance of plot, gets about three distinct emotions to cycle through and mostly handles them by crossing her arms and looking pointedly at the floorboards. There is a specific background extra in the second-act wedding sequence—a man in a mint-green sherwani who forgets to chew during the dinner scene—that I watched for about four minutes straight because the main conversation between Puri and Talpade had completely flatlined. It's a small thing, but it bugged me, mostly because the camera kept lingering on him as if waiting for a punchline that never arrived.

The cinematography by Himman Dhamija has that flat, digital sheen that makes every outdoor location look like a parking lot behind a studio in Goregaon, no matter how many yellow mustard flowers the art department managed to truck in and scatter around the perimeter. You miss the grit of older Hindi movies, the kind where the sweat looked real and the dust actually got into your teeth instead of just sitting on the lens like a smudge of Vaseline. The soundtrack by Sneha Khanwalkar tries to inject some local color with dhol beats and brass bands, but the mixing is so aggressive that it often drowns out the dialogue, which is occasionally a blessing given some of the groan-worthy puns about real estate values and marital discord. There's an recurring trumpet cue that hits every single time Om Puri opens a ledger book, and by the fourth iteration, you start wishing someone would simply take the instrument away and bury it under the foundation. Talpade attempts to bring some of that manic vulnerability he had in Iqbal, but here it just comes across as loud, especially when paired with scenes where he has to yell about canal water rights for what feels like an eternity without drawing breath.

Property in these stories is never just about money, obviously, because land in this cinematic universe always stands in for lost honor or a broken father-son bond that nobody bothered to mend before the credits rolled on their childhood. Yet the film treats its own themes with such casual indifference that you wonder why anyone bothered typing out the final draft, let alone securing financing from a major studio. The brothers bicker over rooms and walls like children fighting over a single orange, but there's no actual malice in them, just a mild, damp irritation that matches the weather. Dobriyal has a great moment where he tries to bury a deed under a pile of cow dung, and for a second, the movie threatens to turn into something genuinely anarchic and weird, the kind of rural farce where nobody comes out looking clean. Then someone starts talking about family values with a straight face, and the camera pulls back to a wide shot that shows off the terrible continuity of the brickwork behind them. It's not great, not bad, just there, occupying space on a Tuesday afternoon when you have nothing better to do than watch veteran actors sweat through their makeup.

By the time the third act limps toward its inevitable resolution involving a sudden change of heart and a group hug under a grey sky, you realize how thoroughly the narrative has squandered its own premise. There are no stakes here, only intervals between arguments where people eat samosas and look at their watches. Puri gives one good sigh near the end—just a long, rattling expulsion of air that seems to sum up the entire production budget—and then everyone starts smiling for the final photograph. It's an abrupt way to end a movie that spent two hours going nowhere in particular, but honestly, any other ending would have felt like a lie.