Saif Ali Khan keeps rubbing his thumb against his prayer beads in a way that suggests he rehearsed the gesture in front of a mirror until it lost all muscle memory. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time he did it, which was roughly every four minutes across two hours of relentless geopolitical gloom. You sit there in the dark waiting for a Hindi movie about sleeper cells to breathe a little, to let a quiet scene linger without an ominous cello scrape telling you that someone is about to detonate a device or lie about their credentials, and instead, director Rensil D'Silva just leans harder into the grimness. If I'm honest, the whole enterprise feels less like a narrative feature and more like a twelve-part television miniseries that someone took an axe to in the editing suite just to get the runtime under a hundred and twenty minutes.

The screenplay, co-written by Karan Johar and D'Silva, operates with the sort of blunt-force irony that usually gets workshopped to death in writers' rooms where nobody drinks tap water. Avantika and Ehsaan meet in America, fall in love over coffee and liberal arts platitudes, and then relocate to a picturesque suburb that looks like a stock photo for terror awareness. Kareena Kapoor spends the first half-hour running around in oversized cardigans trying to look like a professor of Islamic studies who hasn't quite figured out how to balance her checkbook, while Khan is all low-voiced charm and immaculate waistcoats. When the narrative drops its pretense of being a standard romantic drama and reveals its true colours, the gear shift isn't just abrupt; it leaves skid marks. You can practically hear the screenwriters flipping pages and whispering about the box office implications of introducing suicide vests into a mainstream romantic pairing.

Khan plays Ehsaan Khan with a chilling, dead-eyed smoothness that somehow makes him less terrifying than he probably should be on paper, because the performance is so consistently subdued that it flattens out the actual stakes. He shares a bizarre dynamic with Kirron Kher, who plays a grieving mother with her usual volume turned up to a level that can crack plaster, shouting her grief into spaces that desperately need quiet. Kapoor does some genuinely good work when she is allowed to just look terrified in a kitchen, though the script constantly forces her to make decisions that defy basic survival instincts. You find yourself whispering at the screen when she leaves her phone on the counter or fails to run out the front door when the opportunity presents itself, which is never a great sign for audience identification. Vivek Oberoi shows up later as an investigative journalist with a haircut that belongs in a totally different decade of Hindi movies, lending the proceedings a frantic, breathless energy that feels imported from a Hollywood action flick of the late nineties.

Visually, the film adopts that ultra-glossy, desaturated blue grade that every thriller made after 2008 seemed contractually obligated to use, making even a sunlit American campus look like a morgue. The camera moves with a relentless, gliding slickness that never stops to let you look at the background details, as if the producers were terrified you might notice the extras walking the wrong way. Salim-Sulaiman’s background score is a constant, suffocating blanket of low-frequency hums and sudden, jarring percussion hits whenever a character opens a door too quickly. There is a recurring acoustic motif that plays every time Kapoor looks out a window, and by the third time it dropped, I started timing the silence between notes just to stay sane. It's the sort of heavy-handed musical cueing that reminds you how much contemporary Bollywood movies rely on the orchestra to tell the audience what their faces should be doing.

Beneath the genre mechanics, the story wants to interrogate the geography of paranoia, asking how easily the architecture of a quiet neighborhood can be co-opted by radical ideologies. Yet it refuses to trust its own premise, opting instead for broad melodramatic showdowns on deserted airstrips that belong in an entirely different tradition of Hindi cinema, one closer to the bombastic thrillers of the nineties than anything resembling social realism. Om Puri pops in for a few scenes as a senior intelligence official and immediately steals every frame he occupies simply by lowering his voice and refusing to look at the camera, showing everyone else how to underplay a scene about state-sponsored terror. Dia Mirza gets even less to do, functioning mostly as a plot device with legs who exists to deliver exposition about passport controls and sleeper cell logistics before disappearing for reels at a time.

What lingers isn't the political argument or the heavy-handed moralizing about the cost of extremism, but rather the sheer exhaustion of watching talented people grind themselves to dust against a script that treats its audience like they need every motivation spelled out in neon. There is no room for ambiguity here, no lingering shots of ordinary life that might ground the terror in something recognizable, just a breathless march from one staged confrontation to the next until the credits finally drop like an anvil.