The coat is too blue. It is an electric, synthetic thing that looks like it was bought off a rack in a hurry five minutes before the cameras rolled, and every time Parineeti Chopra pulls it tight against the London mist, I am pulled right out of the movie by the sheer costumey-ness of it all. Hindi cinema has never quite known what to do with weather that isn't either a monsoon downpour or brilliant sunshine, so we get this sort of default bleakness where everyone wears charcoal and navy and walks beside murky rivers with their hands shoved deep into pockets. Director Ribhu Dasgupta doesn't seem interested in the texture of actual cold, preferring instead the cinematic shorthand for it, which involves an awful lot of bluish filters and breath frosting up on cue whether the scene calls for it or not. This is an adaptation of Paula Hawkins by way of Hollywood's previous attempt starring Emily Blunt, and if I'm honest, the whole enterprise smells faintly of second-hand DVD bins and late-night streaming algorithms designed to keep you awake just long enough to not cancel your subscription. We are dropped immediately into the hazy, blood-stained consciousness of Mira Kapoor, a woman whose memory functions like a torn net, catching only jagged pieces of truth while the important stuff slips away into the grey London sludge. She drinks from silver hip flasks in train compartments with the desperate regularity of a metronome, her face smeared with the smudged mascara of someone who has spent the last three days crying in public transport terminals. Chopra has plenty of baggage to carry here, both literal and emotional, and she leans into the physical degradation of alcoholism with an almost punishing enthusiasm that leaves very little room for subtlety or grace.

The screenplay by Amarjeet Singh and Dasgupta tries desperately to transplant the commuter-belt claustrophobia of the original text into an expat Indian milieu that feels neither entirely British nor properly rooted in anything else, floating instead in that weird, placeless limbo where most modern international thrillers go to die. Characters speak in clipped, overly explanatory Hindi dialogues while surrounded by aggressively British extras who are clearly just local actors hired for the day from a casting agency in Soho, and the mismatch creates a low-level friction that never quite goes away. The narrative structure relies heavily on those fractured timelines that filmmakers use when they want to disguise the thinness of their plotting behind a lot of fancy editing, jumping back and forth between Mira’s hazy blackouts, Aditi Rao Hydari’s sunlit, tragic interludes as the ill-fated Nusrat, and Kirti Kulhari’s stern, no-nonsense inspector who wears leather jackets that cost more than my first car. It is a messy affair, not great, not bad, just there, dragging its feet through plot points we saw coming from the second reel while pretending it has some profound psychological insight into female rage and domestic trauma. The train rides themselves lack the hypnotic rhythm that made the book work so well, trading the quiet menace of daily transit for frantic jump cuts and a score that sounds like someone dropped an iron pipe down a stairwell every time a twist approaches. I kept waiting for the narrative to settle down and trust its own geography, but the camera never stops twitching, darting around hotel rooms and police interrogation cubicles like it's terrified the audience might look away for a single second and realize nothing much is actually happening.

Then there is Aditi Rao Hydari, who exists in this film almost entirely as a series of slow-motion close-ups where the wind catches her hair just right and the lighting makes her skin look like polished porcelain, which is a shame because she has genuine screen presence when they actually let her talk. She plays Nusrat, the object of everyone's obsession, the woman across the tracks whose seemingly perfect life turns out to be a cage built by violent men, and she plays her with a quiet, breathy fragility that feels closer to a ghost story than a gritty urban thriller. When she shares a frame with Avinash Tiwary, who plays her increasingly volatile husband, the movie actually achieves a kind of heavy, humid tension that makes you forget about the ridiculous blue coats and the dodgy accents for a few minutes. Tiwary has this terrifying way of smiling with just his mouth while his eyes stay completely dead, a trick that reminded me a lot of how Manoj Bajpayee used to dominate similar scenes in Kaun before all the digital gloss took over Hindi movies. But the script won't let these actors breathe, constantly hauling them back into the service of a whodunit plot that cares less about human behavior and more about hiding clues in the worst possible places. Nusrat exists to be watched, judged, and eventually broken, reducing a character who could have been complicated into just another body found by the water with a tragic backstory tattooed onto her forehead.

Kirti Kulhari enters about thirty minutes in and instantly tries to chew the scenery right off its hinges, playing a British-Indian cop with a personal stake in the case and a collection of waistcoats that deserve their own credit. She strides into rooms with an aggressively brisk gait, tossing off sarcasms like confetti while staring suspects down with the sort of fierce intensity that usually wins awards in television procedurals. It's a fun performance if you like your acting big and broad, though it doesn't mesh at all with Chopra's internal, sweaty misery or Hydari's ethereal drifting, leaving the central trio pulling in three completely different directions at any given moment. This disjointedness bleeds into the technical departments, where the cinematography by Tribhuvan Babu Sadineni lurches wildly between glossy magazine spreads for perfume ads and muddy handheld footage that looks like it was shot on an old iPhone during a power outage. The sound design is particularly guilty of over-egging the pudding, dropping heavy bass thuds every time Mira has a flashback, as if we are too dim to realize she is remembering something unpleasant without the theater seats vibrating under our thighs. Bollywood movies have always had a complicated relationship with subtlety, but this particular brand of loud, imported noir feels especially hollow, borrowing the aesthetic of Scandinavian crime dramas without any of the cold, sociological observation that made those stories stick to your ribs long after the credits rolled.

The thematic underpinnings of the whole mess gesture vaguely toward surveillance, female complicity, and the way men appropriate women's bodies for their own private dramas, but it never digs deep enough to leave a mark. Mira is supposed to represent the unreliable narrator par excellence, a woman whose alcoholism has made her a pariah in her own life, yet the film treats her addiction with the sort of shallow cinematic pity that feels patronizing rather than earned. We see her chugging gin in dimly lit kitchens and stumbling through tube stations, but we never feel the actual physical weight of the sickness, only the plot utility of her blackouts whenever the writers need to hide a crucial piece of evidence from the audience. This isn't an exploration of trauma; it's a genre exercise that uses trauma as a cheap set of IKEA furniture to dress up an empty room, rearranging the cushions every twenty minutes to keep us from noticing there's no bed to sleep on. The men in the story are either gaslighting monsters or completely useless ciphers, which might have been a deliberate choice if the women weren't also being squeezed into such narrow, predictable boxes by a script that lacks the courage of its own cynical convictions. By the time the final confrontation rolls around in an abandoned industrial shed that has probably been used for fifty other action climaxes this decade, you stop caring who killed who and just want everyone to go home and get some dry clothes.

There is also a bizarre recurring motif involving a flock of pigeons that appears outside Mira’s window whenever she is feeling particularly low, and after the fourth time it happened, I stopped listening to the dialogue entirely just to see if they were using the exact same stock footage twice. They were. It is a small thing, sure, but it speaks to the general indifference that hangs over the production, a sense that nobody involved cared enough to sweep the floor before letting the public in to look around. The editing by Chandan Arora is frantic where it should be patient, chopping up conversations between Kulhari and Chopra with jump cuts that destroy any possibility of dramatic rhythm, turning what could have been a sharp duel of wits into a choppy montage of scowling faces. Hindi films have tried their hand at psychological thrillers with varying degrees of success over the years, and while this one avoids the outright camp of the worst nineties rip-offs, it lacks the cold precision needed to pull off a proper Hitchcockian homage in the twenty-first century. It stays right in the middle of the road, honking its horn at ghosts, wearing the wrong coat for the weather, and hoping nobody asks too many questions about why anyone bothered making it in the first place.