The audio mix during the opening classroom sequences of Hichki pushes the ambient chalk-scratching and desk-scraping right up against your eardrums with a harshness that feels less like a stylistic choice and more like a budgetary oversight in the Foley department. Director Sidharth Malhotra chooses to ground his adaptation of Brad Cohen’s autobiography in the sensory overload of neurological reality, which is admirable until you realize the sound design cannot decide whether to mimic subjective internal chaos or objective room tone. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every time the audio clipped on a sharp consonantal burst from the back row.

Rani Mukerji plays Naina Mathur, a teacher battling Tourette syndrome who lands a precarious position at a prestigious elite school teaching a classroom of unruly slum kids dumped into the system through a quota policy. The screenplay, credited to multiple writers, walks a dangerous line between genuine observation and calculated manipulation, leaning hard into the sort of broad institutional friction that has powered Hindi films for decades without quite figuring out how to make the administrative hypocrisy feel earned rather than hoisted in from central casting. The rich kids are uniformly snotty in that specific way screenwriters imagine wealthy teenagers behave when they have never actually spoken to one. They sneer, they roll eyes, they set traps involving dead rats and altered exam papers, executing pranks with the deadpan precision of middle managers plotting a corporate merger.

Mukerji saves the entire enterprise from drowning in its own earnestness through sheer muscle memory and a refusal to play Naina as a saintly martyr. She lets the tics—the sudden head jerks, the explosive barking sounds—disrupt her line delivery without ever letting them become the only thing you remember about the performance. When she stands before her class of rejects and misfits, she doesn't offer an inspiring speech right away, and that hesitation is where the film finds its pulse. She stares them down, her jaw locked, dealing with an involuntary vocal spasm right in the middle of a disciplinary warning, and for a few seconds, the picture feels less like a polished product from a major studio and more like a genuine collision of bodies in a confined space. It is a world away from the glossy perfection of Shah Rukh Khan’s campus wandering in Mohabbatein, trading cashmere sweaters for frayed cotton dupattas and sweat that actually looks like sweat.

Supriya Pilgaonkar and Ivan Rodrigues drift through the background as supportive family members and exasperated principals respectively, playing notes that have been struck a thousand times in commercial Hindi cinema with a professionalism that borders on invisibility. Nobody is bad, exactly, but the supporting players are trapped in a narrative engine that requires them to be either obstacles to be overcome or cheering sections for Naina’s inevitable triumph. There is a recurring violin motif in the background score by Jasleen Royal that arrives with the heavy-handed predictability of a freight train hitting a stalled car, signaling emotional turning points long before the characters have even finished their sentences. Cinematographer Avinash Arun captures the dust motes dancing in the sunlit windows of the dilapidated staff room with a fleeting grace, but as soon as the camera moves into the hallways, the lighting flattens out into standard television-grade brightness that strips away the grit.

The script insists on treating education as a battlefield where every standardized test is a moral crusade and every principal with a clipboard is a cartoon villain standing in the way of human potential. This reductionist view of pedagogy ignores the actual, grinding mechanics of institutional failure in favor of heroic individual salvation, a trope that bollywood movies have relied on since the days of Do Aankhen Barah Haath. Yet, despite the familiar machinery of the genre, there are moments where the film catches fire through the performances of the younger cast members, particularly Asif Ali Haider Khan and the rest of the kids playing the 9F section. They bring a physical slouch and an unspoken resentment to their scenes that no amount of dialogue rewriting could manufacture.

The central conflict hinges on whether these underprivileged kids can pass board exams that are deliberately weighted against them, a plot point that turns academic assessment into a high-tension sports match complete with slow-motion pencil-sharpening and tense close-ups of ticking clocks. It’s hard to stay invested in the math scores when the editing keeps cutting to reaction shots of the smug upper-class students looking nervous in the adjacent hall. The movie wants to talk about systemic prejudice, but it keeps getting distracted by melodramatic plot mechanics involving stolen exam papers and redemption arcs that wrap up with neat little bows before the end credits. Still, when Mukerji delivers her final monologue—fighting through a spasm that threatens to choke off her breath entirely—the cynicism drops away for just long enough to remind you why she remains one of our most commanding screen presences, even when the vehicle hauling her across the finish line is missing half its bolts.