There is a specific kind of cigarette smoke that hangs in the corners of Manish Srivastava’s directing debut that feels less like production design and more like an old coat left in a damp cupboard. It’s an annoying little detail, honestly, but it bugged me from the very first frame because it smells like half-hearted noir.

You sit there watching Naseeruddin Shah pull off yet another weary superior officer routine and you wonder how many times the man has stood in front of a whiteboard in a dimly lit precinct explaining to subordinates that the commissioner is breathing down his neck. He does it well, obviously, because he can do it in his sleep, but that is precisely the problem. He looks like he parked his car in the wrong lot and wants to go home to watch the cricket.

The plot itself is supposed to be this jagged puzzle box about a missing girl, a murdered drug peddler, and a corrupt police force trying to sweep a high-society overdose under the rug before the morning papers hit the stands. It relies heavily on shifting perspectives, dragging you back to the same crime scene through the hazy memories of different witnesses who are all lying with varying degrees of competence. This structure works when the writing has teeth, but here the dialogue sounds like it was translated from an outdated translation of a pulp paperback found in a dusty corner of a railway station bookstall. It’s clunky, full of awkward pauses, and lacks that specific rhythm that makes modern Hindi films punch above their weight when they try to get gritty.

Disha Arora and Auroshikha Dey try to lift the heavy lifting off the screen, but they are constantly fighting against an editing rhythm that feels like it was cut by someone who was afraid of silence. Every scene lingers just two beats too long on a reaction shot, draining the tension right out of the room before the characters even get a chance to finish their sentences. You can practically hear the director shouting cut in your head.

Compare it to something like Paanch where the squalor felt earned and every frame smelled of stale beer and desperation. Here, the grime looks rented. It looks like somebody went to a hardware store and bought three cans of industrial shadow and sprayed them over the sets.

The soundtrack doesn't help matters either, leaning on low-end synthesizer drones that buzz like a refrigerator with a loose compressor whenever someone starts sweating under interrogation. It repeats a four-note motif every time a character looks suspiciously at another character across a desk, which gets old by the fourth time. If I'm honest, it made me miss the days when bollywood movies just had a guy strumming an acoustic guitar in the background to indicate mood.

There are moments, scattered and thin, where the ambition peeks through the mud. A conversation between Shah and a low-level informant in the back of a parked Ambassador has a genuine pulse to it, mostly because both actors drop the theatrical weight and just mumble through their lines like they have somewhere better to be. That kind of lived-in casualness is rare in these kinds of procedurals, where everyone usually talks like they are auditioning for a stage play in front of an empty balcony.

Yet the film refuses to stay in that low-key gear, always rushing back to its convoluted timeline tricks and choppy flashbacks that explain things we already figured out ten minutes ago. It treats its audience like they are half-asleep, which is ironic because the movie itself is a bit of a sedative.

The cinematography keeps washing everything in this teal and amber grade that has become the uniform for any crime thriller made in this country over the last decade, robbing the streets of actual texture in favor of a stylized gloom that means nothing. You lose the sense of where people actually are in the city, reducing Mumbai to a series of abstract alleyways and neon signs reflected in puddles that look entirely artificial.

When the third act arrives, it doesn't so much blow the doors off as it creaks them open to reveal a thoroughly predictable conspiracy involving politicians who look bored and cops who are corrupt because the script called for it rather than because the narrative demanded it. It’s a shame because the cast deserves better material to chew on than a recycled script that treats moral ambiguity like a plot twist you can order off a menu.

Shah gives a professional turn, of course, because he is physically incapable of sleepwalking through a scene entirely, but his eyes are dead behind the spectacles. He knows the jig is up long before the credits start rolling on a note of flat irony that doesn't sting the way it thinks it does.

Hindi cinema has done this tired routine a thousand times, and unless the directors start trusting the silence between the lines instead of filling every inch with bad lighting and repetitive score cues, we are going to keep getting these ghosts of better stories.