The shirt Deepak Dobriyal wears through the first twenty minutes of Kuldip Patwal: I Didn't Do It has a stubborn grease spot near the third button that nobody on the wardrobe truck seemed to notice, or maybe they noticed and figured it fit a man accused of assassinating a junior minister in broad daylight. Let's be honest, you look for small anchors when a courtroom drama starts spinning out those convoluted timelines where half the witnesses are lying to protect a brother or a cousin who was at the tea stall behind the corner paan shop when the shot rang out. Remy Kohli's direction has this restless energy that won't let the camera settle on a static two-shot for more than four seconds, which makes following the witness testimonies feel less like watching a judicial proceeding and more like dodging traffic on a rainy Tuesday afternoon near Linking Road. We have seen this structure before in countless Hindi movies that try to ape Hollywood legal thrillers without understanding that a deposition doesn't need aggressive whip-pans to hold an audience's attention. The screenplay by whatever committee of writers managed to get credit on the poster relies heavily on flashbacks that contradict each other in the exact same spots, creating a puzzle box where half the pieces were carved from a different puzzle entirely. It is a messy affair.

Deepak Dobriyal doesn't play Kuldip as a victim of state machinery or a saint wrongfully accused, choosing instead to make him twitchy, defensive, and genuinely annoying when people try to help him. When he yells at his court-appointed lawyer that he was nowhere near the podium, his voice cracks in a way that suggests a man who has spent too many nights sleeping on unpadded wooden benches rather than a falsely targeted everyman hero. Gulshan Devaiah shows up as the public prosecutor with a mustache that appears to have its own internal legal counsel, strutting around the well of the court with a calculated disdain for everyone who didn't go to the same three colleges he did. It is a performance that reminds you of his work in That Girl in Yellow Boots, though here he is allowed to lean into a sleazier, more theatrical brand of menace that fits the tawdry nature of local political killings. Raima Sen hovers at the edges of the frame as a journalist trying to untangle the mess, though her scenes mostly consist of looking concerned while staring at blurry printouts in dimly lit press boxes where nobody ever seems to do actual reporting. The supporting cast features a few actors who are clearly dubbed by someone standing three feet away from a cheap studio mic in Versova, a distracting audio quirk that pulls you right out of the tension whenever a constable yells an objection.

The cinematography goes heavy on blue filters for the interrogation scenes and an aggressive amber wash for the flashbacks, as if the color grade was meant to do the heavy lifting that the lighting department missed on the day. There is an electronic drone on the soundtrack that kicks in every single time a character looks at a piece of evidence, and after the fourth or fifth repetition, you start praying for three minutes of absolute silence just to clear your head. It's a small thing, sure, but when a score telegraphs every single narrative shift with the subtlety of a falling anvil, the drama starts to feel like a soap opera that wandered onto a movie set by mistake. Still, the film deserves some credit for refusing to hand the audience a neat moral lesson about systemic corruption in the judicial apparatus. Instead of treating the political murder as an indictment of the entire nation, the story shrinks the scope down to petty local vendettas, personal jealousies, and municipal land grabs that feel depressingly authentic to how power actually operates in small towns.

Hindi films have a long tradition of courtroom melodramas where justice arrives like a deus ex machina with a gavel, but this one prefers a murkier, unsatisfying conclusion that leaves everyone slightly more miserable than they were before the trial began. Kuldip Patwal stays a cipher until the very end, neither completely innocent nor definitively guilty in a way that satisfies the bloodlust of the cable news anchors barking from the television sets in the background. The pacing collapses entirely in the second hour, dragging through procedural dead-ends that add nothing to our understanding of who pulled the trigger or why anyone cared about the dead minister in the first place. You find yourself checking your watch during a monologue about land registry laws that goes on for six minutes too long, wondering if the editor simply forgot how to use a pair of shears on the digital timeline. This is not the kind of picture that launches endless internet debates about its hidden layers or brilliant metaphors, mostly because it lacks the discipline to sustain a single tone for more than twenty minutes at a stretch. It ambles, it stumbles, and occasionally it strikes a raw nerve before wandering off into another flashback about a local election gone wrong.