Raj Batra wears shoes that squeak on the imported marble of his own showroom, and if I'm honest, that little acoustic detail bothered me through the entire first act. Chandni Chowk is loud and crowded and smells like burning oil and fried pastry, but Raj and his wife Mita have made enough money selling knock-off designer labels to buy a sprawling glass cage in Vasant Vihar, complete with a massive walk-in closet and security guards who look like they hate their lives. The problem isn't the wealth. The problem is that wealth in Delhi doesn't buy you an accent, or a pedigree, or an invitation to the school board meetings that matter. They have a daughter, Pia, and she needs to get into one of the top five English-medium elite schools in the capital if she's ever going to belong, which means her parents have to unlearn every single thing about who they are and pretend to be bleeding-heart liberals who live in a slum.

Director Saket Chaudhary films these early social-climbing maneuvers with a brisk, slightly jittery energy that recalls the bustling chaos of Dibakar Banerjee's Khosla Ka Ghosla, though with a slicker, more commercial sheen. He stages the consultant scenes—where high-priced admissions fixers teach wealthy parvenus how to hold a wine glass and pretend to do charity work—as dry, observational comedy that doesn't need to nudge the audience in the ribs. The screenplay, co-written by Zeenat Lakhani, hits some predictable beats when the family is forced to actually move into a decrepit tenement block in Bharat Nagar to prove their poverty status, yet it recovers quickly by refusing to let Raj and Mita become entirely noble figures. They are hypocrites, full of vanity and casual cruelty disguised as parental anxiety, and the film lets them sweat.

Irrfan Khan anchors this entire precarious structure with a performance that feels less like acting and more like breathing in a crowded elevator. He uses his shoulders to show defeat, hunching them inward when Mita starts reading pamphlets about Montessori pedagogy, and his delivery of throwaway lines carries an effortless, street-smart rhythm that reminds you why he was irreplaceable in Hindi films. Watch his face when he has to eat lentils cooked by a neighbor in the tenement—he doesn't make a big show of disgust, just a micro-adjustment of the jaw that registers the absence of ghee before he smiles and forces it down. Saba Qamar, playing Mita with a terrifying, coiled intensity that borders on fanaticism, matches him step for step without ever softening into a conventional movie mother.

There is a specific supporting actor, playing a wealthy PTA president with terrible hair plugs, who is clearly dubbed by someone in a sound booth whose voice doesn't match his skull shape, and it pulls you right out of the room every time he opens his mouth. The cinematography by Sachin K. Krishn alternates between the sun-bleached glare of South Delhi luxury apartments and the dingy, fluorescent-lit corridors of the government-mandated quota housing without ever getting too glossy for its own good. Sachin-Jigar's soundtrack leans heavily on recycled Punjabi wedding tracks that feel engineered for radio play rather than narrative texture, though a late-night street-corner argument between Raj and a disillusioned local factory worker relies on silence rather than background strings to land its punch.

Class anxiety in modern Indian cities makes for messy viewing because the targets are always moving and the rules of the game keep changing while you are standing in line. Bollywood movies usually treat the rich as cartoon villains or benevolent patriarchs who hand out bonuses at Diwali, but here the middle class is shown eating itself alive over report cards and board game nights. The satire targets the absurdity of English as a moral benchmark, a linguistic passport that separates the civilized from the barbarians, and it occasionally hits the mark with terrifying accuracy.

Deepak Dobriyal enters the narrative halfway through as Shyam, a genuine resident of the Bharat Nagar slum who helps Raj navigate poverty bureaucracy, and his performance brings a sudden, heavy anchor of tragedy that threatens to capraise the light comedy. Dobriyal doesn't play poverty as a noble state of grace; he plays it as exhaustion, a permanent state of being behind on rent and afraid of the local police. When Raj tries to lie to Shyam about his identity, the camera stays on Dobriyal's eyes, and you can see the exact moment he decides to play along just to have a friend.

The script loses its footing in the final reel when it abandons the satirical sharp-elbows for a big emotional speech on a school auditorium stage, dragging the narrative into melodrama that feels borrowed from a different, less interesting project. It is a shame, because up to that point, the story had been content to let its characters remain thoroughly complicated, small-minded, and desperate without demanding redemption. You leave the theater thinking about the sound of those squeaking shoes in the showroom, and whether anyone ever really manages to walk out of the room they were born in.