There is a specific kind of shoulder twitch Gaurav Arora does in the opening twenty minutes of Love Games that suggests his nervous system is being operated by someone sitting three blocks away with a very cheap remote. It is not great, not bad, just there. The film begins with a party scene that looks less like a high-end Mumbai social gathering and more like the lobby of a suburban hotel during an off-season pharmaceutical convention, drowned in cold blue lighting that makes everyone look slightly jaundiced even when they are supposed to be glowing with wealth and decadence.

Vikram Bhatt directs with the sort of relentless, hammer-and-tongs velocity that usually characterizes a man who has ten minutes to finish shooting a scene before the parking meter runs out, cutting between medium shots of people shouting at each other and extreme close-ups of whiskey glasses being slammed onto mahogany tables with aggressive, deafening foleys. The screenplay feels less like a narrative structure and more like a stack of glossy tabloid pages that someone spilled cheap vodka over and then tried to rearrange while blindfolded. It tries to map out a cold, clinical game of emotional cruelty among the glitterati of Mumbai, but the writing is so literal-minded that every character has to state their psychological damage aloud as if they are reading from an intake form at a poorly funded psychiatric clinic. They talk in slogans meant to sound like profound insights into modern urban anomie, though most of them just land with the dull thud of a wet newspaper hitting pavement.

As Ramona, Patralekha hurls herself into the proceedings with a terrifying, unfiltered intensity that often feels entirely disconnected from the movie happening around her, screaming dialogue at volumes that suggest she is trying to reach someone standing on the opposite bank of a very wide river. Her performance lacks the slippery nuance that made Urmila Matondkar so genuinely unsettling in Pyaar Tune Kya Kiya, opting instead for a single, shrill register of unhinged possessiveness that never lets up for even a single quiet moment. She bites her lip, she glares through strands of straightened hair, she paces around hotel suites in Louboutins that clatter against the floorboards with distracting loudness.

Gaurav Arora matches her volume if not her commitment, playing Sameer as a man whose entire personality consists of a tailored suit and a permanent expression of mild indigestion. He spends most of the runtime looking like he has just realized he left the stove on at home, which actually works quite well for a character whose hobby involves sleeping with married women just so he can watch them unravel in slow motion. Then Tara Alisha Berry enters the frame as Alisha, bringing a much-needed softness that the movie immediately tries to bludgeon to death with more melodrama about childhood trauma and dead parents.

The cinematography relies heavily on slow pans across empty tabletops and dramatic pushes toward actor's eyeballs whenever someone says the word love with enough venom to kill a houseplant. It is glossy in that specific, digital way that makes everything look like it was shot on a phone with an expensive lens attachment, devoid of any genuine texture or warmth. Whenever the characters drive somewhere, the rear-projection work outside the car windows is so aggressively fake that you can see entire city blocks looping twice in the same conversation, making it look as though they are stuck on a treadmill in front of a badly photocopied backdrop of Bandra. The soundtrack is a relentless assault of generic electronic lounge beats mixed with weeping violins that show up every time a character pauses to look longingly out a high-rise window, punctuated by sound effects that emphasize every single door slam with the subtlety of a falling safe.

This kind of mid-budget psychological thriller used to be a staple of Bollywood movies during the early two thousands, when directors could get away with preposterous plots as long as the hair gel was shiny and the apartments looked expensive. Love Games wants to be an adult exploration of modern relationships in contemporary urban India, but it treats its audience with such aggressive condescension that every plot twist arrives with a flashing neon sign five minutes before it actually happens on screen. The characters constantly declare that they are operating outside the boundaries of conventional morality, yet their transgressions amount to little more than petty cruelty dressed up in designer outfits that probably cost more than the lighting rig used to shoot the night sequences.

There is a recurring musical cue that plays every single time Patralekha’s character enters a room, and after the fourth or fifth repetition it starts to sound like a kazoo being blown inside a metal bucket. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every time it came back around. The supporting cast drifts in and out of scenes like extras who wandered off the set of a different production entirely, with several actors clearly dubbed by people who had never met the performers on screen, resulting in lip movements that lag behind the dialogue by a full half-second. It makes the dramatic confrontations feel less like intense psychological warfare and more like an awkwardly timed Zoom call with a terrible internet connection.

Hindi films have a long and glorious history of messy, over-the-top melodramas about wealthy people behaving badly in high-rise apartments, but those stories usually need a certain stylistic panache to sell the absurdity. Here, the sheen is so thin and the dialogue is so leaden that you can practically see the wooden sets shaking whenever someone slams a door too hard. It refuses to let any single moment breathe, rushing from one confrontation to the next with a manic energy that suggests even the filmmakers knew the script wouldn't hold up under prolonged scrutiny. Even when the central trio is supposed to be locked in a tense triangle of manipulation and psychological dominance, they just look like tired actors waiting around for craft services to open.

By the time the narrative stumbles toward its predictable conclusion, you are left wondering why anyone involved thought this particular brand of hollow provocation needed to be committed to digital storage. It wants to shock you with its depiction of dark desires, but it mostly just bores you with its profound lack of imagination. The final scene resolves nothing of interest, trailing off on a close-up of a shattered wine glass that lingers on screen for three full seconds after the actors have stopped moving.