The sound design in the opening ten minutes of Pankh leans so heavily on the ambient whine of a dressing room fluorescent tube that I spent the first act adjusting my headphones, assuming my laptop was dying. It isn't. That high-pitched electrical hum just sits under the dialogue like an uninvited guest, buzzing away while characters shout across cramped Mumbai apartments about royalty cheques that never cleared. Sudipto Chattopadhyay directs with a sort of restless, twitchy energy that feels less like a stylistic choice and more like he lost his coffee and had to finish the schedule on sheer spite. Hindi films rarely know what to do with childhood trauma that doesn't involve a tragic train accident or a weeping mother under a ceiling fan, so watching a movie about a boy forced to play a girl on the screen feels genuinely weird. Not great, not bad, just there, scraping against your nerves while the plot tries to figure out if it wants to be a psychological thriller or a forgotten episode of a Star Plus drama.

Maradona Rebello plays the older version of Kusum, the cross-dressing child star now grown into a shattered young man who spends his days hiding behind heavy curtains and cheap wigs. He moves with a hesitant, jerky posture, hunching his shoulders as if trying to shrink away from the camera's gaze, which makes sense given the narrative burden placed on him. It is a grueling performance that requires him to look terrified, exhausted, and furious all at once, sometimes within the span of a single close-up where the focus pulls just a fraction too slow. When he shares the frame with Bipasha Basu, who plays the imaginary friend or guardian angel or hallucination living inside his skull, the film finds its only real pulse. Basu plays this manifestation with an aggressive, predatory glamour that calls to mind Madhuri Dixit's fiercely protective dancer in Anjaam, though filtered through a jagged, fever-dream logic that rejects conventional glamour.

Basu strides through cramped tenements in towering heels and silk saris that look completely absurd in the dust and grime, yet she never breaks character for a second, selling the delusion with total conviction. The supporting cast floats in and out of the narrative like ghosts, with Mahesh Manjrekar bringing his usual gravel-voiced weariness to a sleazy producer role that requires him to chew on a pan while making soul-crushing demands. Ronit Roy pops up as well, looking deeply uncomfortable in clothes that belong to a different decade, delivering lines with the flat cadence of a man who read his pages five minutes before the slate clapped. Sandhya Mridul manages to wring a few moments of genuine pathos out of a script that treats her mostly as a narrative obstacle, giving her scenes a jagged, lived-in texture that the rest of the production frequently lacks. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how often the editing cuts away from her reactions a beat too early, robbing the dramatic beats of the oxygen they desperately need to land.

The screenplay collapses under the weight of its own ambition somewhere around the midpoint, abandoning character logic to chase after heavy-handed metaphors about exploitation in the entertainment industry. Bollywood movies have a long history of exposing the dark underbelly of stardom, but usually, those stories possess some narrative discipline, whereas Pankh just throws ideas at the wall to see what leaves a stain. The cinematography by Saurabh Goswami relies on hyper-saturated gels and murky shadows, turning every indoor location into a neon-lit cave that feels distinctly unlivable. Yet there are moments of striking visual power, like when the camera tracks low across a floor littered with old headshots, capturing the discarded faces of forgotten actors catching the glare of a passing headlight. The soundtrack tries desperately to provide emotional cues that the editing fails to generate, recycling the same three-note piano motif until you want to scream at the speakers.

This kind of cinema occupies a strange, lonely space in the wider landscape of Indian pictures, refusing commercial safety while lacking the precise craft of festival darlings. It wants to talk about identity, gender performance, and the psychological scars left behind by adults who view children as cash cows, but it lacks the vocabulary to articulate these issues without resorting to melodrama. By treating its protagonist's suffering as a series of surrealist freakouts rather than a grounded human tragedy, the film keeps the audience at arm's length. You end up watching it the way you watch a car crash on an overpass, recognizing the wreckage without feeling any desire to step closer to the glass.