There is a specific kind of awkwardness that happens when a Hindi movie tries to treat amnesia like a puzzle box instead of a tragedy, and honestly, it can be a chore to sit through.

Director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury wants to give us a labyrinth of memory loss and financial corruption, setting the whole thing in a dusty government office where files stack up like tombstones, but the machinery keeps getting stuck on its own cleverness. AK Srivastava, played by Pankaj Tripathi with that familiar slouch that suggests his spine is made of wet cardboard, wakes up in a hospital bed without any idea how he got there or why half the people in his life look at him like he owes them money. The screenplay by Ritesh Shah and Viraj Pal bounces back and forth across timelines using hospital corridors and interrogation rooms as a jumping-off point, trying to construct a procedural where the crime is whatever happened inside Srivastava's own head. It reminds me a bit of how trapped everyone felt watching *Drishyam* unspool its elaborate alibis, except here the mystery doesn't have the courtesy to be exciting, preferring instead to wallow in bureaucratic gloom and long, echoing stares across filing cabinets.

Tripathi is doing the Tripathi thing, which is to say he is charmingly weary, speaking in that rhythmic murmur that makes even a grocery list sound like a state secret, though by the hour mark it stops feeling like a character choice and more like a safety blanket he refuses to take off. You can see the gears turning behind his tired eyes even when the script asks him to look completely blank, which defeats the point of the amnesia angle a little bit, but he holds the frame anyway because that is what bankable actors in modern Hindi films are paid to do when the dialogue runs dry. Sanjana Sanghi plays his daughter with an intensity that mostly involves standing in doorways looking betrayed, while Jaya Ahsan and Parvathy Thiruvothu circle the periphery as women who either know too much or have reasons to keep him in the dark. Parvathy, in particular, has a sharp screen presence that cuts through the beige office walls, though she is saddled with lines that feel like they were translated from a legal textbook and then run through a blender. Paresh Pahuja shows up as well, doing competent work as the sort of ambitious junior officer who exists entirely to give Tripathi someone to sigh at while drinking lukewarm tea out of a paper cup.

The cinematography by Avik Mukhopadhyay relies heavily on sickly greens and institutional yellows, making the finance department look like the inside of a bruised liver, which gets old long before the credits roll. Every shadow is heavy, every hallway stretches out into an infinity of fluorescent glare, and after a while, you just want someone to open a window. The background score by Shantanu Moitra clings to the scenes like a damp overcoat, swelling up every time a character has an epiphany about their childhood or their mortgage, which happens roughly every six minutes. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how the same four-note piano motif drops every single time Tripathi touches his forehead in confusion, as if the audience might forget he has a head injury unless the keyboard tells them so. Sound design shouldn't double as a medical chart.

What the film is really trying to get at is how institutional systems chew up honest people and spit them out as filing numbers, using memory loss as a metaphor for the way government servants selectively forget their own complicity, but it never quite trusts the audience to make that connection without having a character explain it aloud in a conference room. The narrative wants to be a psychological drama about the unreliability of truth, but it keeps getting distracted by red herrings involving chit-fund scams and bribes that belong in a much cheaper television serial. When the various pieces finally click into place during the last twenty minutes, the revelation doesn't feel earned so much as it feels inevitable, like a train pulling into a station you knew was there all along because you saw the tracks outside the window when you bought the ticket.

There are worse ways to spend an afternoon than watching capable performers try to elevate material that treats them like chess pieces, but nobody is going to talk about this one next year, or next week for that matter. The pacing drags in the middle act, the supporting characters drift in and out of the plot based on when the script needs a new roadblock, and the whole enterprise feels less like a finished movie and more like a rough cut that needed another pass in the editing room to trim the fat and sharpen the knives. It sits there on the screen, not great, not bad, just taking up space until the lights come back on and you can go check your phone.