Radhika Apte pronounces a certain word near the middle of her segment with a slight nasal drag that feels completely unscripted, like she forgot the camera was spinning for a second and just stayed in the argument anyway. It is a small thing, but it bugged me the first time and grew on me by the third. We have grown so used to the hyper-articulate delivery demanded by modern streaming algorithms that hearing an actor actually mumble through a syllable without apologizing for it feels almost radical. X is an anthology built out of that exact brand of messy human friction, though it rarely gets the credit for how hard it tries to dismantle the usual polish of Indian cinema. Eleven different directors tackling one man’s romantic history sounds like a recipe for tonal whiplash that would throw any reviewer into an early grave, yet the thing somehow holds together through sheer stubbornness.

Rajat Kapoor plays K, the aging filmmaker whose memories populate the screen like unwanted houseguests who refuse to wipe their feet. He looks tired. He looks like a man who has spent forty years explaining subtext to people who only wanted the song and dance, and that exhaustion seeps into the performance whether the script asks for it or not. When he sits across from the various women who represent different chapters of his past, he does not lean into charm or regret because he is too busy trying to figure out how he ended up in this particular room with this particular person. The structure relies entirely on his ability to anchor vignettes directed by people with wildly divergent sensibilities, moving from breathless art-house experiments to straightforward conversations about compromise.

Abhinay Deo and Nupur Asthana and eight other filmmakers split the duties, which means the visual grammar shifts every fifteen minutes or so without so much as a courtesy warning. One minute you are watching a sun-bleached domestic showdown that looks like it was shot on an old handycam during a particularly nasty Sunday morning, and the next you are trapped in a moody, neon-drenched hotel room that owes a massive debt to Wong Kar-wai without quite knowing why. It makes for an uneven ride if I am honest, dragging in places where the directors seem more interested in their own clever transitions than the actual emotional core of the scene, but the sheer variety keeps your eyes from glazing over.

The supporting cast rotates through these changing rooms like ghosts summoned by a bad memory, each woman representing a distinct era of K’s romantic failures and intellectual pretensions. Bidita Bag brings a jagged, unpredictable energy to her segment that cuts through the nostalgic fog Kapoor tries to generate, refusing to let him turn her into just another symbol of his youthful indiscretions. She treats the man with an amused contempt that feels earned through years of dealing with men who think directing short films makes them philosophers. Her scenes have a rhythm that completely bypasses the usual romantic clichés found in mainstream Hindi movies, favoring uncomfortable silences and abrupt topic changes over grand reconciliations.

Cinematography duties are split among several people whose names deserve more ink than a single review column affords, yet the lighting choices occasionally lean too hard into high-contrast moodiness just to remind us we are watching an independent project. There is a recurring saxophone cue that pops up every single time K looks out a window at a rainy street, and I lost count of how many times that exact same four-note motif signals a shift into introspection. It is a minor annoyance, sure, but it happens often enough to pull you right out of the illusion of spontaneous memory. Sound design otherwise does heavy lifting, catching the scrape of a chair and the awkward cough before a difficult admission with terrifying clarity.

The script tackles the exhausting nature of male ego without giving its protagonist an easy out or a redemptive arc to soften the blow for viewers who might see too much of themselves in his fading glory. K is not a monster, but he is certainly a bore who uses his intellect as a shield against genuine emotional accountability, and the film is smart enough to let the women point that out directly rather than letting him narrate his own rehabilitation. We have seen versions of this character in countless other stories about aging artists coming to terms with their past, but rarely has a project allowed the supporting figures to dismantle the central myth so thoroughly.

There is an interesting conversation to be had about how this project fits into the broader ecosystem of independent Hindi cinema, especially given how few of these multi-director experiments actually make it past festival circuits and into public consciousness. Most bollywood projects rely on safe formulas and predictable emotional beats to guarantee weekend box office returns, making an unruly experiment like this feel like an artifact from another era entirely. It lacks the slick pacing of a commercial thriller and the bloated runtime of an epic drama, existing instead in that uncomfortable middle space where characters just talk and drink tea and realize too late that they have wasted thirty years on arguments about nothing in particular.

By the time the narrative circles back to its beginning without offering any grand epiphanies or life lessons, you feel less like you have watched a complete story and more like you have eavesdropped on a very long, slightly tedious phone call between two exes who should have hung up hours ago. Kapoor gives a performance that refuses to pander to the audience's need for likability, grounding the entire chaotic enterprise in the heavy reality of an ordinary man looking back at his own wreckage. It is messy and frustrating and occasionally brilliant in ways that make you forgive its stylistic indulgence, proving that sometimes the best way to examine a life is to let ten different people take a turn at the editing bay and see what is left standing when the dust settles.