The dubbing on that one junior police officer in the background of the station scene is out of sync by a full second, which I'm mentioning right now because it's the exact kind of small, irritating technical glitch that pulls you out of a movie before it's even really started. It's a small thing but it bugged me, mostly because Hindi movies have gotten so much better at sound design over the last decade that you don't expect to hear a lazy ADR line bouncing off a brick wall in a supposedly gritty procedural. Te3n is an adaptation of a Korean thriller called Montage, though you wouldn't necessarily know it from the way Ribhu Dasgupta directs the opening scenes, which lean much heavier into the damp, crumbling decay of Kolkata than the precise mechanics of a kidnapping plot. We are dropped into a city that feels like it's dissolving under monsoon moisture, where every wall is streaked with moss and every character looks like they haven't slept through a single night in three years. Amitabh Bachchan plays John Biswas, a grandfather who has spent eight years obsessively visiting police stations and staring at old case files because his granddaughter was abducted and never found, walking with a stiff, slow shuffle that avoids all the usual movie-star theatrics of grief. He doesn't scream at heaven. He just sits on wooden benches and fills out forms with a trembling hand that looks genuinely frail, not just made up to look old.

Beside him is Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Martin Das, a former cop who traded his uniform for a church choir robe after a similar kidnapping case broke his spirit and left him clinging to Jesus and bad whiskey. Nawaz plays Martin with a twitchy, self-loathing energy that reminds me a bit of his work in Raman Raghav 2.0, all nervous hand movements and sideways glances that suggest a man who can't look at his own reflection without flinching. He's got these terrible, greasy curls and a cassock that looks like it hasn't seen a washing machine since the previous election cycle, shambling through the dusty pews with a posture that says he's carrying forty pounds of guilt in his lower back. When John approaches him with a new theory about the old case—because the exact same kidnapping method has just been used on another child—Martin doesn't want to help, but he also can't stop himself, dragged back into the machinery of investigation like an addict sitting outside a betting shop. Their dynamic is the spine of the whole picture, two broken men shuffling through the yellow-tinted gloom of a city that has completely forgotten them. Vidya Balan shows up as Sarita Sarkar, the investigating officer who is also knee-deep in the second kidnapping, wearing sharp trousers and an expression of permanent, bone-deep exhaustion that feels earned rather than acted. She plays the scenes with a brisk, no-nonsense impatience that cuts right through the melodrama, treating both John and Martin with the weary tolerance of someone who has too many files on her desk and not enough coffee in the breakroom.

The screenplay by Suresh Nair and Bijesh Jayarajan keeps twisting the timeline back and forth through muddy flashbacks that occasionally threaten to confuse who kidnapped whom and when, but Dasgupta holds the camera tight on his actors' faces so you stop caring about the logistics of the ransom drop. The cinematography by Tushar Kanti Ray is practically marinated in tea-stains and mold, using natural light that filters through dirty window panes and street lamps that cast long, sickly yellow shadows over empty tram tracks. There is no soaring background score telling you when to feel sad; Clinton Cerejo's music mostly consists of low, droning cello notes and faint ambient noise that sounds like traffic heard from inside a closed suitcase. It makes the procedural elements feel remarkably mundane, which is actually a compliment because real police work is mostly people sitting in damp rooms drinking lukewarm water out of plastic cups. Yet the film keeps tripping over its own feet whenever it tries to become a clever puzzle box, inserting unnecessary red herrings and sudden narrative swerves that belong in a different, slicker sort of thriller. That's where the adaptation strain shows, as if the writers couldn't quite decide whether they wanted a slow-burning character study about elderly grief or a twist-heavy mystery that would keep internet forums guessing for a week. The middle section drags quite a bit, not in a meditative way, but in that awkward way where characters drive to the same three locations twice to have the exact same conversation about a grainy CCTV screenshot.

Nawazuddin carries those flat stretches purely on the strength of his voice, which drops to an uneasy whisper whenever he talks about the original case file, giving the exposition a weird, confessional weight it doesn't strictly deserve. Amitabh, meanwhile, does some of his best late-career work by simply refusing to dominate the frame, letting Nawaz take the oxygen and staying quietly in the background with his hands tucked into his pockets, looking like a man who has forgotten how to smile. It's a performance built entirely out of small physical details—the way he adjusts his glasses before asking a difficult question, the slow blink of his eyes when someone tells him another dead end has been reached. He doesn't play a hero; he plays an antique piece of furniture that someone keeps kicking by accident. By the time the third act rolls around and the plot finally forces the characters into a confrontation that resolves the kidnapping mystery once and for all, you realize you weren't really watching for the solution anyway. You were watching for the texture of the rooms, the sound of rain hitting corrugated tin roofs, and the way Vidya Balan rubs her temples when another suspect starts lying to her face. Te3n doesn't reinvent the genre or offer up any grand philosophical statements about justice in modern India, and honestly, it's a small thing but it bugged me how easily the final culprit's motive was solved by a single laptop search. Not great, not bad, just there, hanging around in your memory like a rainy Tuesday afternoon when you didn't have anything better to do than watch two old men walk slowly down an empty alleyway.