There is a specific kind of background hum in certain mid-budget Hindi films that tells you precisely how much money was spent on the sound design, and in Setters, that hum sounds like an air conditioner working too hard in an empty government office. It starts in the second scene and stays there, beneath the dialogue, beneath the ambient traffic, a low-frequency reminder that this was mixed in a hurry.

Ashwini Chaudhary directs with a sort of blunt-instrument efficiency that feels increasingly rare in contemporary Hindi movies, refusing to linger on the visual poetry of small towns or the grit of competitive exam centers. The screenplay, credited to Tricesh Jha and Vishal Vijay Kumar, tracks the sprawling, bureaucratic machinery of cheating syndicates who rig entrance tests for medical and engineering colleges across northern India with an almost journalistic dryness. Characters walk into rooms, state their business, slide manila folders across laminate tables, and walk out. There is no stylistic flash to disguise the exposition dumps, which makes the plot easier to follow if you can stay awake through the mid-section sag where things just sort of stall out.

Manu Rishi Chadha plays Apoorva with his usual world-weary slouch, the kind of actor who looks like he has personally negotiated every mediocre rental agreement in Delhi and survived to regret it. He doesn't overplay the villainy of running a multi-crore education scam, preferring to treat the corruption like a municipal utility that simply requires adequate bribery and sensible shoes. Across from him, Anil Charanjeett brings a twitchy, low-to-the-ground energy that occasionally threatens to spark the frame into actual life, though he is let down by scenes that repeat the exact same negotiation dynamics three or four times too many. Ishita Dutta wanders through the periphery as an investigating officer whose primary narrative function is to look unimpressed while men explain things she already knows, and if I am honest, she never quite finds a way to make the procedural jargon sound like dialogue a real person would speak.

The cinematography relies heavily on a muddy, washed-out palette that seems designed to evoke the grim reality of coaching hubs like Kota, but mostly just makes everyone look slightly jaundiced under fluorescent tubes. It is not great, not bad, just there, functioning as visual wallpaper for a narrative that moves too fast to care about composition. Then there is the background score, which leans on a generic electronic pulse whenever a character makes a phone call about money, as if the audience might otherwise forget that financial transactions are occurring. The sound editors also made the baffling choice to use the exact same squeaky door hinge effect every single time someone enters a low-rent hotel room, and once you notice it, you hear it in every other sequence until the credits roll.

What keeps the film from sinking entirely into the muck of forgettable direct-to-OTT fodder is its refusal to manufacture moral outrage about the state of the education system. It doesn't treat the kids buying leaked papers as tragic victims of societal pressure or pure-hearted innocents corrupted by a cruel world; they are mostly just practical kids who want a secure salary and a shot at a decent marriage market, much like the characters in Dibakar Banerjee’s Khosla Ka Ghosla, though without the satirical warmth or the sharp social observation. The system is portrayed not as a broken machine that needs fixing by a righteous hero, but as an ongoing ecosystem where everyone from the invigilator to the cabinet minister takes their cut and sleeps fine at night.

There are long stretches where the movie feels less like a finished theatrical feature and more like an extended pitch reel for a streaming series that couldn't secure the second-season budget, leaving the narrative arcs clipped and unresolved in ways that feel accidental rather than artistic. Supporting actors drift in and out of scenes with accents that fluctuate wildly across state lines, sometimes mid-sentence, which happens a lot in these regional crime dramas. You get the distinct impression that entire subplots involving local politicians were left on the cutting room floor, leaving behind jarring edits where characters suddenly show up in new locations without any geographic logic.

Bollywood movies have long had an uneasy relationship with the darker corners of systemic corruption, usually preferring to wrap things up with a rousing courtroom speech or a vigilante showdown that restores faith in the republic. Setters mostly avoids that trap by simply stopping when the money runs out and the cops arrive to take away the mid-level fall guys, leaving the architects of the scam comfortably ensconced in their air-conditioned offices. It is an unsatisfying resolution by traditional narrative standards, but it has the ring of administrative truth, which is a rare enough commodity in commercial Hindi cinema to make the rough edges forgivable.