Rajkummar Rao’s jaw doesn't move when he’s processing the witness testimony in the opening act of Prahaar, and that stillness—that almost reptilian lack of reaction—is the only thing that kept me from checking my phone during the first twenty minutes. He plays Ujjwal Nikam with a kind of internal friction that feels less like a performance and more like a man trying to solve a Rubik’s cube in his head while a building burns down around him. It’s an interesting choice, keeping the energy so tamped down, but I’ve got to say, there’s a persistent, buzzing sound effect—like a low-frequency hum—that kicks in every time he walks into a courtroom, and it’s genuinely distracting, like someone left a refrigerator open in the sound design suite.

The screenplay, penned by a committee that clearly spent too much time in the archives of high-court transcripts, struggles to balance the procedural rigor of a legal thriller with the messy, sentimental demands of mainstream Bollywood movies. It tries to humanize Nikam by giving him these brief, flickering moments of domestic normalcy, like trying to fix a leaky faucet or eating a cold paratha, but they feel bolted on. Lalit Prabhakar, playing the antagonist, brings a snarling, desperate energy that almost saves the second act from drowning in its own self-importance. He isn't playing a villain so much as a man who knows he has already lost the game and is just trying to knock over the board on his way out. When he and Rao share the screen, the film stops feeling like a glorified biography and starts feeling like actual cinema, even if the director, whose name I already need to double-check, can’t resist cutting to a slow-motion shot of a gavel hitting wood every single time a point is made.

Wamiqa Gabbi is there, too, playing the junior counsel, and she manages to carve out a space for herself in the margins, though she’s mostly left to deliver exposition that sounds like it was lifted directly from a law textbook. There is a sequence where she tries to explain the nuances of the Evidence Act to an uninterested police inspector, and the edit lingers on her face for four seconds too long, presumably to let us soak in the gravity of the legal point, but it just feels like the reel is stuck. It’s a small thing but it bugged me. Jaideep Ahlawat appears for a blistering ten minutes in a guest role that demands more than the rest of the cast gets in two hours, and he carries that same weight he brought to Paatal Lok, turning a brief deposition into a Shakespearean monologue about the rot in the state machinery.

Sikandar Kher and Ashish Vidyarthi occupy the edges of the frame as the veteran lawmen who have seen it all, and honestly, they play the tired, cynical mentor archetype with a bit too much ease. It is the kind of casting that feels like a shortcut. The cinematography is relentlessly grey, washed out to a degree that makes the entire city of Mumbai look like a dusty, neglected file cabinet in an basement office. I suppose the visual intention was to reflect the austerity of the law, but the result is a movie that looks like it was shot through a dirty windshield during a power cut. The soundtrack occasionally swells into these booming orchestral chords that are meant to signify the weight of justice being served, but they feel misplaced, almost comical, against the dry, technical dialogue.

If I’m honest, the biggest hurdle this film faces is the inherent problem of making a biopic about a living legal figure who is defined by his public restraint. Hindi films have a tendency to want to turn everyone into a crusader, a revolutionary, or a martyr, and when the real subject is someone who built his career on bureaucratic consistency, the filmmakers invent stakes that aren't really there. They try to manufacture a personal vendetta to justify the intensity of the climax, which pulls the story away from the legal facts and into the realm of the typical vigilante fantasy. It’s not great, not bad, just there, stuck between wanting to be a gritty procedural and needing to be a heroic star vehicle. The tension between the reality of the courtroom and the requirements of the box office is visible in every scene, like a seam in a suit that wasn't stitched quite tight enough.

There is a recurring motif involving a watch that keeps getting smashed or stopped, and it serves as this heavy-handed metaphor for time running out for the victims, but the prop master clearly used three different brands of watches throughout the shoot. Continuity errors like that take me out of the story faster than a bad line reading. The film attempts to tackle the theme of systemic silence, the way institutions protect themselves by simply ignoring the evidence, but it never quite lands on a concrete argument. It just points at the corruption and sighs. It’s a safe, middle-of-the-road choice for a subject as polarizing as Nikam, whose public life has been marked by some very aggressive, specific legal tactics that don't get much sunlight here. The film prefers the silhouette of the man over the actual skin and bone, polishing the edges until there’s nothing left to catch on.

The pacing is another issue that persists throughout the final act. We spend an eternity waiting for the verdict on a case that we already know the outcome of, so the script leans heavily on Reaction Shots of the gallery, the judge, and the stenographer to manufacture suspense. It’s a clunky way to handle the lack of narrative surprise. If you were looking for a deep dive into the psychological toll of prosecuting death-row cases, this isn't it, because the film is too busy worrying about maintaining a dignified, heroic image for its protagonist. It treats the law as a closed loop, where the right man just needs to show up, say the right thing, and the system magically cleans itself up. That’s a fantasy that even the most dedicated fan of Hindi movies might find difficult to swallow after a while, especially when the supporting cast is doing all the heavy lifting to keep the emotional temperature above freezing.

The sound design team went overboard on the ambient noise in the street scenes, creating a wall of horns and shouting that makes the actors sound like they are competing for space, forcing the audience to strain just to catch the important bits of the dialogue. It’s probably meant to be immersive, but it’s just exhausting. By the end, the focus shifts away from the legal arguments and onto the physical toll the process takes on the lead character, which is a welcome shift in tone, even if it comes about an hour too late to make a real impact. There’s a scene where he simply takes off his black coat and hangs it on the door, and the sound of the hanger hitting the hook is the loudest thing in the room.