Abhay Deol wears these terrible tinted glasses for about twenty minutes in the middle of Anurag Kashyap's 2009 film that make him look less like a tortured romantic and more like someone who lost a bet at an airport lounge. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every time he walked into a frame with those amber lenses hiding his eyes, flattening out the performance right when the character is supposed to be spiraling into total oblivion. We have seen the self-destructing alcoholic trope a million times in Hindi movies, usually accompanied by poetic voiceovers and rain machines, but Kashyap throws all that sentimental garbage into a dumpster and sets fire to it. He treats Devdas not as some sacred literary text that needs to be handled with silk gloves, but as a dirty, pathetic, neon-drenched mess of a boy who deserves every bad thing happening to him. The opening ten minutes don't establish mood or introduce backstory with any kind of polite restraint, they just drop you straight into a teenager's feverish recording session of a breakup song on a webcam, capturing that specific, nauseating brand of humiliation that only first heartbreak can produce. It feels less like watching a polished product from Mumbai studios and more like someone hacked into a dead teenager's hard drive and found all the embarrassing video files they forgot to delete.

Kashyap shoots Delhi and Chandigarh with a sort of grimy, handheld urgency that makes you want to take a shower just from looking at the pavement, utilizing color filters that change from sickly yellow to violent neon pink depending on how drunk or high the protagonist happens to be at that exact second. The editing is choppy in a way that feels intentional rather than accidental, cutting away from conversations before they finish and lingering on dead space in hotel hallways just to let the awkwardness sit in your lap. I lost count of how many times the camera shakes during a simple street-crossing sequence, which is annoying if you get motion sickness easily, but it forces you to stay inside the nervous system of people who are making terrible decisions by the minute. Amit Trivedi's soundtrack does something miraculous by blending Punjabi folk samples with electronica without sounding like it was engineered for a discotheque in Bandra, though the way certain vocal motifs get hammered over and over during the second act starts to grate on the nerves if I'm honest. You hear the same bass-heavy hook every time Mahie Gill's character lights another cigarette or stares blankly at a ceiling fan, and while it creates an intoxicating atmosphere initially, by the fourth repetition you just want the needle to lift off the vinyl.

Abhay Deol plays Dev not as a tragic hero of classical literature but as a whiny, entitled brat who uses his family's wealth and his own self-pity as a shield against the consequences of being an absolute disaster of a human being. He doesn't beg for your sympathy, which is precisely why he eventually earns it, walking through brothels and dingy motel rooms with a slouch that communicates total moral bankruptcy without needing a single explanatory monologue. When he yells at Paro, his voice cracks in that unattractive, froggy way real men sound when they are losing an argument they know they started, completely devoid of cinematic heroism or manufactured grace. He reminds me a bit of Mickey Rourke in Barfly, that same exhausted swagger of a guy who is drinking himself to death simply because he lacks the imagination to do anything else with his Tuesday afternoon, refusing to clean up his act even when people are practically begging him to stop. Opposite him, Mahie Gill brings a bruised, physical intensity to Paro that completely erases memories of Aishwarya Rai crying gracefully in flowing red garments, playing her as a woman who makes her own calculated compromises with the patriarchy and then lives with the ash in her mouth. She bites her lip, she smokes bidi cigarettes with a terrifying casualness, and when she looks at Dev across a crowded courtyard, her eyes aren't swimming with pure romantic longing so much as they hold a quiet, murderous contempt for his weakness.

Then there is Kalki Koechlin, who bursts into the picture as Chanda with an unhinged, high-voltage energy that makes every other actor on screen look like they are sleepwalking through their rehearsals, chewing through dialogue with a weird, accented vulnerability that instantly grounds the sleaziest corners of the narrative. Her introduction in the red-light district is messy and loud, far away from the dignified tragedy usually assigned to sex workers in older Bollywood movies, showing a teenager trying on a hard persona because the soft one got her thrown out of her house. The relationship that develops between her and Dev isn't built on redemption or healing or any of that therapy-speak nonsense that ruins modern dramas, but rather on two mutually ruined people figuring out how to share a mattress without making each other feel worse about the morning light. They watch weird television programs together, they argue over money, they ignore each other for days, and the camera just watches them exist in that miserable little room without trying to turn their misery into art. It is in these quiet, unglamorous stretches that the film finds its actual pulse, long after you have stopped caring about whether the original plot points of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's novel are being checked off correctly or ignored entirely.

The supporting cast features Parakh Madan as Dev's sister-in-law, a character who could have easily been written off as a standard nagging relative in lesser Hindi films, but here she gets moments of sharp, defensive cruelty that make her feel frighteningly real. She looks at Dev with a mix of exhaustion and disgust that anyone who has ever had to host an addicted relative for more than a weekend will recognize immediately, slamming doors and hiding the good liquor bottles with practiced efficiency. No one in this movie behaves like a saint or a cartoon villain, which is perhaps why the narrative occasionally sags when it tries to lean too hard into symbolic imagery during the final twenty minutes where the fire motifs start getting a bit heavy-handed. There is a stretch near the end where the visual metaphors become so thick you feel like you are being beaten over the head with a burning branch, losing some of that documentary-style friction that made the first hour so thrillingly dangerous to watch. Yet even when the symbolism gets clumsy and the editing choices grow a bit too frantic for their own good, the sheer nerve of the enterprise keeps you pinned to the seat, wondering how far down these broken people are willing to dig before they finally hit rock bottom and decide to stay there.