The sound design in Sona Spa starts grating about ten minutes in and honestly, if I'm honest, it never really lets up once you notice it. Every single time a character shifts position on a mattress, there is this exaggerated creak that sounds less like natural furniture movement and more like a foley artist trying to earn their day rate by aggressively squeezing a piece of heavy leather. It is a small thing that bugged me through the entire first reel, compounding until every scene set inside the titular establishment feels underlined by the aggressive acoustics of cheap production audio.

Based on Makarand Sathe’s play and directed by Makarand Deshpande, the film takes place in a bizarre nocturnal facility where wealthy, insomnia-riddled clients pay to sleep while underprivileged workers absorb their chaotic dreams on behalf of the management. Naseeruddin Shah plays the Baba who runs this operation with a sleepy, unbothered authority, leaning against doorframes like he wandered off the stage of a completely different production and decided to stay for the craft service table. Deshpande shoots most of the narrative in cramped, dimly lit interiors that owe an obvious stylistic debt to the moody staging of Black Friday, though without that picture’s kinetic momentum or budget.

The screenplay struggles to maintain a consistent tone, shifting abruptly from broad theatrical farce involving domestic bickering among the dream-workers to heavy-handed socio-economic commentary about labor exploitation. Pooja Pradhan and Romi Jaispal do what they can with dialogue that often feels stubbornly anchored to the proscenium arch, barking lines at one another with the kind of projection designed to reach the back row of a municipal auditorium rather than survive the intimacy of a close-up lens.

Shruti Vyas pops up as one of the younger sleep-receivers, bringing a twitchy, nervous energy that cuts through the sluggish pacing of the midsection, while Vinit Sharma plays around the edges with a weary shrug that suggests he read the script and figured out the ending forty pages before anybody else on set. There is an awkwardness to how these actors share the frame, frequently looking like they are waiting for a cue that was cut during the final edit or reacting to spatial cues that don't quite match the surrounding coverage.

Bollywood movies have long struggled with adapting theatrical source material without leaving the dramatic scaffolding fully exposed to the harsh light of cinematic realism, and this project stumbles into precisely that trap. The camera rarely knows where to look during the long dialogue exchanges, panning across blank walls or lingering too long on extras who are clearly trying not to blink while pretending to be fast asleep under thin cotton sheets.

The dream sequences, which should theoretically offer some visual respite from the cramped aesthetic of the spa dormitories, are rendered in washed-out digital video that looks suspiciously like standard-issue stock footage of suburban traffic and rain-slicked pavement. A better score might have covered up some of these visual shortcomings, but the soundtrack relies on a repetitive synthesizer cue that loops endlessly during moments of emotional tension, creating an atmosphere closer to a late-night cable infomercial than a psychological drama.

Shah remains watchable simply through the sheer weight of his professional muscle memory, drifting through scenes with a half-smile that implies he knows the premise is ridiculous and has decided to just lean into the absurdity of it all. You can trace a direct line between his casual disregard for the material here and his more interesting work in other mid-budget Hindi films from that decade, where authority figures often double as cynical commentators on the proceedings around them.

The themes of sleep deprivation, class divide, and the commodification of rest are handled with the subtlety of a falling anvil, spelling out every metaphor three times just in case anyone in the back row missed the point about who is doing the actual labor in modern society. When the narrative finally wraps up its loose threads, it does so with a weary sigh rather than a dramatic crescendo, leaving the viewer alone with those screeching mattress sounds and the lingering impression of a fascinating premise that got lost somewhere between the stage and the editing suite.