Arjun Rampal's ears in Daddy are a serious commitment, a bit distracting at first if I'm being honest, pulling your eye away from the dialogue scenes just enough to notice the putty line along the cartilage. You stop looking at the prosthetics eventually because the movie has this relentless, grey-brown momentum that doesn't let you sit with your nitpicks for very long, dragging you down into the damp, narrow chawls of late-seventies Bombay where everyone seems to be sweating through their shirts. Ashim Ahluwalia didn't want to make a glossy, slow-motion gangster epic with sweeping string sections and slo-mo bullets hitting glass partitions, choosing instead to strip away all the usual cosmetic gloss that usually coats stories about the underworld in contemporary Hindi films. He shoots the place like a documentary crew dropped into a riot with a handful of 16mm cameras that have seen better days, capturing the grease on the walls and the smell of cheap kerosene and stale sweat without ever sliding into nostalgic pastiche. It's an ugly, cramped world where rooms feel too small for the bodies inside them, and the camera lingers on corners that should be out of focus just to remind you that nothing in this city was ever built to last.

The screenplay, which Rampal co-wrote alongside Ashish Patil, refuses to explain Arun Gawli's motivations with neat little childhood flashbacks or convenient psychological epiphanies that make murderers understandable to suburban audiences who just want a clean narrative arc before dinner. He is just there, moving through the frame with a kind of heavy, exhausted stillness that makes him less of an action hero and more of an immovable object blocking the hallway, staring at people until they stop talking. This approach separates Daddy from the standard biopic machinery we usually export, avoiding the loud, chest-thumping nationalism of something like Border while still keeping things firmly anchored within the commercial expectations of mainstream cinema. The supporting cast populates these rooms with an authenticity that feels lived-in rather than cast from a talent agency catalog, especially Nishikant Kamat as a weary politician who treats murder like a bureaucratic hurdle that needs to be cleared before lunch. Kamat plays the role with his eyes half-closed, looking like a man who has not slept a solid eight hours since the emergency was declared, lending a weary, pragmatic weight to the political machinations swirling around Gawli's growing influence.

Aishwarya Rajesh anchors the emotional core of the film as Asha Gawli, standing in the doorway with her arms crossed while the men argue about turf and extortion rates in the living room, bringing a quiet, observant tension to scenes that might otherwise have dissolved into shouting matches. She doesn't get the big weeping monologues that usually win awards in Bollywood movies, instead communicating volumes with a slight shift in her posture or the way she refuses to look at her husband when he brings home money she knows is soaked in blood. That restraint keeps the domestic scenes from turning into melodrama, giving the film a lived-in texture that reminds you how ordinary women often have to manage the fallout of revolutionary politics and neighborhood gang wars while keeping the kerosene stove lit. Rampal matches her quietness with his own, shedding his usual leading-man charisma to play a man who speaks in short, flat sentences and rarely smiles, though the physical transformation occasionally works against him when he has to convey complex grief through layers of latex and greasepaint.

The sound design deserves a special mention here because it does the heavy lifting that the dialogue sometimes avoids, layering the background with the constant, irritating hum of ceiling fans, distant trains, and shouting neighbors that never quite stops. It's a small thing that bugs me how modern Hindi movies insist on wallowing in complete silence during dramatic reveals, but Ahluwalia lets the noise of the city bleed into every conversation, making the quiet moments feel earned and fragile. The soundtrack avoids the trap of generic item numbers and thunderous intro tracks, opting instead for period-appropriate jazz fusion and sparse percussion that feels like it's being played in a smoky, half-empty bar down the street. Paired with Jessica Lee Gagné and Pankaj Kumar's grainy, desaturated cinematography, the audio choices create a sensory envelope that feels genuinely oppressive, sticking to your skin long after the projector has clicked off and the house lights have come up.

There are structural stumbles, of course, particularly in the second half where the chronology gets messy and the timeline jumps around between police interrogations and flashback sequences without leaving clear signposts for the audience to follow. A random supporting actor playing an informant in the third act is so clearly dubbed by a different voice artist that every time he opens his mouth you are instantly jerked out of the 1980s and dropped right back into a suburban Mumbai recording studio. It breaks the spell, even if only for twenty seconds, reminding you of the mechanical seams holding together a production that otherwise tries so hard to feel organic and unvarnished. But these lapses in polish are almost welcome in a film that could have easily been smoothed out into a boring, prestige-TV exercise about a misunderstood local Robin Hood.

By refusing to redeem Gawli or demonize him with cheap cinematic tricks, the film leaves you stranded in a moral grey zone where nobody wins and the cops are just as corrupt as the criminals they are trying to box into a corner. Farhan Akhtar shows up late in the game as a composite character based on a famous cop, bringing a crisp, tailored urgency to proceedings that have grown heavy and stagnant, though his immaculate safari suits look a bit too clean for the grime of the era. He plays the cop with a sharp, impatient energy that cuts through the sluggish atmosphere, providing a much-needed narrative foil for Rampal's monosyllabic gangster. Their interrogation scenes crackle with a low-key hostility that feels earned through two hours of buildup, avoiding the fistfights and dramatic monologues you might expect from a standard cop-versus-criminal showdown in commercial Indian cinema.

We have seen this rise-and-fall gangster trajectory a thousand times before in everything from Satya to Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai, yet Ahluwalia manages to find a distinct visual rhythm that keeps you watching even when the plot starts spinning its wheels in the mud of local political disputes. He isn't interested in romanticizing the violence or giving us a neat moral takeaway about the corrupting nature of power, choosing instead to observe these people like specimens in a jar under a harsh, flickering fluorescent bulb. The film just ends on an unresolved note of domestic routine, with Asha folding clothes while Arun sits silently in the fading light, refusing to give us the catharsis of a grand courtroom verdict or a bloody alleyway shootout. It leaves you with the strange feeling that nothing was really resolved at all, which is probably the most honest thing a movie about the Bombay underworld could possibly do.