Jimmy Shergill is standing in a poorly lit corridor in a way that suggests he would rather be almost anywhere else in the world, which is actually a remarkably accurate way to play a man who is currently presiding over the slow, bloody dismemberment of a fictional Mumbai underworld empire. If I'm honest, the first twenty minutes of Shravan Tiwari's Aazam feel like a series of dimly lit meetings where everybody is talking about someone who just left the room, or someone who is about to walk into it, or someone who is already dead in a ditch somewhere near the docks. It is a movie about succession that takes place almost entirely at night, which creates a visual monotony that gets heavy after a while, though the actors are working hard enough to keep the lamps burning. We have seen this kind of nocturnal power struggle before, of course, mostly in older Hindi movies that didn't feel the need to coat every single frame in a teal color grade just to let the audience know things were getting serious. Shergill plays Javed, the loyal fixer whose face has absorbed every bad decision made by his ailing boss, a mafia don whose imminent death has triggered a frantic scramble among his lieutenants to see who gets to slice up the territory. The script wants us to see this as a local adaptation of Macbeth, but it plays more like an extended board meeting where someone keeps kicking the table over whenever a vote doesn't go their way.

The direction relies heavily on tight close-ups and lingering reaction shots that sometimes stay on an actor's face two beats too long, long enough for you to notice the background extras completely forgetting to pretend they are doing anything useful. Tiwari shoots the whole thing as a single-night event, a narrative choice that forces the clock to tick relentlessly even when nothing of any real consequence is happening on screen. Characters move from one shadowy office to another, arguing over percentages and turf while the background score hums away with a low, synthetic drone that never really goes away. There is an unmistakable stage-play quality to the way the dialogue is delivered, actors standing in semi-circles trading barbs that sound like they were written by someone who reads too many translated crime novels. Abhimanyu Singh plays Maharani, a flamboyant rival who struts through the corridors wearing loud shirts and even louder expressions of contempt, chewing the scenery with a relish that borders on the aggressive. Singh does not so much inhabit his scenes as crash into them, knocking over the carefully constructed tension that Shergill is trying so desperately to maintain. It creates an odd friction between the two lead performances, one actor pulling everything inward toward a quiet, exhausted center, while the other flings his arms about and shouts his lines with an intensity that belongs in a much louder movie.

Then there is Indraneil Sengupta as Inspector Joshi, moving through the carnage with a weary detachment that feels like he wandered in from a completely different genre of filmmaking. Sengupta has this way of listening to people threaten to kill each other as if they were reading him a grocery list, which provides an unintentional comic relief that probably wasn't in the original draft. He is supposed to be the moral anchor, or at least the guy waiting for the criminals to finish the job for him, but mostly he just looks mildly annoyed by the poor acoustics of the police station. The supporting cast is filled with character actors who show up for two scenes, deliver a warning about impending betrayal, and then get bundled into the trunk of a white sedan before they can collect their daily wages. It is a very busy film that somehow manages to feel remarkably empty, a procession of heavy coats and low-slung hats moving through concrete stairwells that all seem to smell vaguely of damp cement and stale tobacco. Bollywood has produced countless iterations of this specific gangster trope since Satya laid down the template for nocturnal urban grit, yet few of them manage to feel quite this clinical about their own violence.

The cinematography is determined to prove that darkness can be artistic, casting long shadows across foreheads and hiding eyes behind thick frames of smoke that billow out from cheap cigarettes. You end up squinting at the screen just to figure out who is holding the gun, a problem that gets genuinely frustrating during the third-watch-the-clock sequence in the warehouse. There's a small audio issue that bugged me throughout the middle stretch where the Foley work on the footsteps doesn't quite match the tile floors, sounding more like wooden clogs in a hallway than leather shoes on concrete. The soundtrack keeps trying to force momentum into scenes that are essentially two men standing six inches apart and whispering about loyalty quotas. It never stops reminding you that something bad is about to happen, which has the unfortunate effect of making the actual bad things feel somewhat routine when they finally arrive.

Javed remains the most interesting part of the experiment, largely because Shergill understands how to play a henchman who is too tired to be ambitious anymore. He does not want the crown, but he knows if he doesn't take it, someone far stupider will put it on his head and ruin what little is left of his retirement plan. The film wants to say something about the rot at the center of institutional power, but it gets so bogged down in who betrayed which uncle at the warehouse that the bigger picture sort of dissolves into a blur of double-crosses. Hindi films have always loved their tragic mobsters, men who quote poetry while cleaning their pistols, though Aazam skips the poetry and goes straight to the bookkeeping. By the time the various factions start eliminating each other in a series of predictable ambushes, you find yourself wondering why nobody ever thought to turn on a single overhead light in the entire district. It's a modest, dusty little noir that tries to punch above its weight class by locking everyone in a room and throwing away the key, leaving the audience to listen to the scuffling from the hallway until the credits roll over a totally silent screen.