Arshad Warsi wears the same heavy, slightly scuffed leather jacket for what feels like four consecutive weeks of screen time, and if I am honest, that wardrobe choice bothered me more than some of the clunkier plotting around the midway point. It is a small thing, sure, but when a character is supposed to be sweating through a grueling investigation under the brutal sun of Punjab, a heavy winter-weight biker garment just sits wrong on the eye. Bollywood has long possessed this weird aversion to dressing its investigative officers like actual working people who might occasionally change their shirts, preferring instead a sort of timeless cinematic stubble and a perpetually untucked collar that suggests casual authority rather than mundane exhaustion.

Directors Aparna Singh and Nishant Tripathi are operating within a very specific strain of issue-based Hindi films that prefer the clatter of a message over the quiet rustle of human behavior, though they occasionally stumble into moments of genuine grit before backing away to explain the plot again. The narrative concerns a mysterious explosion at a factory in Bathinda, drawing together a grieving father played with a kind of hollowed-out fury by Naseeruddin Shah and a cynical National Investigation Agency officer who would rather be anywhere else. There is a fertilizer plant, a corporate magnate played by Divya Dutta with the icy stillness of a bank vault, and a crusading journalist played by Sagarika Ghatge who mostly has to look concerned while holding a notepad near industrial pipes. The script treats industrial pollution and cancer clusters not as a tragedy to be observed with patience, but as a series of whiteboard equations that need to be solved before the intermission hits its mark.

Yet whenever Shah occupies the frame, the movie remembers it is supposed to be about actual pain rather than policy reform. He plays a retired army officer whose daughter was claimed by the toxic groundwater, and he brings a terrifying stillness to scenes where lesser actors would be screaming for the balcony seats. You watch the way his thumb catches on the rim of a tin cup or how his shoulders drop an inch when he realizes another bureaucratic door has been slammed in his face, and it reminds you of his work in A Wednesday, where a similar sort of righteous, ordinary anger anchored a far more breathless thriller. He does not project greatness or chew scenery; he simply shrinks into the grief until the character feels heavy enough to anchor the shoddy digital effects used for the chemical plant explosions.

Warsi provides the friction against that grief, playing against his usual comic persona with a weary, shoulder-shrugging cynicism that feels plucked directly out of a standard-issue procedural. He tosses off dialogue with an offhand murmur that sometimes gets swallowed entirely by the sound design, forcing you to reconstruct whole clauses from context and facial twitches. He and Shah do not share many scenes where they bond over cups of sugary tea or trade witty banter, which saves the film from becoming one of those buddy-cop exercises where opposing temperaments cancel each other out into harmless middle-brow comfort. Instead, they operate in parallel grooves, both circling the same corporate rot from different distances, one motivated by a tombstone and the other by a pension.

The cinematography relies heavily on a jaundiced yellow grade that is presumably meant to evoke the mustard fields of the region or the sulfurous tang of chemical runoff, though it mostly just makes every interior look like it was lit by a dying desk lamp in a municipal records office. There is a persistent drone on the soundtrack that kicks in whenever a drone shot sweeps over industrial smokestacks, a low-frequency hum that repeats so often you start waiting for it like a punctuation mark. It is meant to induce dread, but after the sixth time a DJI phantom camera tracks diagonally across a corrugated metal roof to that exact same groan of synthesized bass, it becomes white noise, easy to tune out while you watch Ghatge stare intensely at a water sample in a plastic bottle.

What keeps the picture from dissolving into a standard-issue public service announcement is its strange refusal to offer tidy redemptions for anyone involved. The corporate villains are not cartoonish mustache-twirlers who cackle in leather chairs; they are polite, well-dressed executives who talk about supply chains and state-level investments with the smooth cadence of men who sleep eight hours a night in air-conditioned suites. When the narrative tackles the agricultural crisis in these northern states, it connects the dots between pesticide overuse and the corporate poisoning of the water table without turning the farmers into saints or the industrialists into demons from a fantasy epic. Hindi movies have often struggled to critique capitalism without wrapping the whole thing in a melodramatic family feud, so the cold-eyed focus on balance sheets and state subsidies comes as a refreshing, if dry, pivot.

The supporting cast features a rotating collection of local politicians and corrupt bureaucrats who all seem to have been cast from the exact same casting directory of guys who play bad guys in every second-tier streaming series, which gives the police stations and government offices a comforting, repetitive texture. You know the exact beat where the bribe will be offered, and you know the exact angle from which the hand-off will be filmed, down to the close-up on the brown envelope sliding across a Formica desk. It is all terribly familiar, an echo of a dozen other gritty procedurals that forgot to include any actual surprises, but the sheer competence of the central performances keeps the machinery turning through the third act without stalling out entirely.

There is a sequence near the climax involving a stolen hard drive and a nighttime dash through an abandoned brick kiln that completely loses its spatial geography due to erratic editing and too many Dutch angles, leaving you to guess who is chasing whom in the dark. It is the sort of action sequence that belongs in a much cheaper movie, stitched together from wide shots of running silhouettes and close-ups of shouting mouths that don't quite match the ambient soundscape. You can feel the budget pinching at the edges of the frame during those ten minutes, forcing the directors to rely on fast cuts to hide the fact that they couldn't afford to light the whole kiln lot properly. It jars against the quieter, more observant moments that came before, where characters simply sat in cars and argued about jurisdiction over warm soft drinks.

By keeping its scope relatively tight and refusing to turn into an all-out courtroom drama where speeches save the day, the film manages to maintain a certain dusty authenticity even when the plot mechanics creak under the weight of their own earnestness. It is not an important piece of cinema, and nobody will be citing it twenty years from now as a turning point for how commercial studios approach ecological horror. Yet there is something respectable about a medium-budget genre piece that tries to engage with real-world poison in the soil instead of relying entirely on gangsters and lost gold. Shah gives it more gravity than it probably deserves, Warsi keeps it moving when the exposition threatens to gum up the gears, and the whole thing ends on a note of flat, unglamorous exhaustion that feels entirely appropriate for a story about state corruption in the agricultural belt.