Bobby says something about a cockroach in the opening twenty minutes that I keep turning over in my head, mostly because the sound mixing makes her whisper so low I had to strain past the guy eating popcorn in the row ahead of me. If I'm honest, half the theater was probably missing those early muttered asides because the dialogue tracks in these mid-budget thrillers always sound like the boom mic was parked three rooms away. It is a small thing, but it bugged me, especially when the film relies so heavily on erratic interiority that gets lost in the mud of a rushed mix.

Kangana Ranaut is playing a dubbing artist who hears things and refuses her medication, which sounds like standard issue psychological melodrama until you watch the way she hurls herself against a doorframe with zero regard for stunt pads or safety choreography. She has this way of locking her jaw that makes every casual conversation look like a pre-emptive strike, shedding the calculated glamour of standard Bollywood heroines for something jagged, sweaty, and genuinely unpleasant to sit next to for two hours. She is playing a woman named Bobby whose reality is constantly fracturing under the weight of childhood trauma, and she doesn't ask for your sympathy once, which is refreshing in an industry where female protagonists are usually forced to earn our love through endless cycles of noble suffering.

Rajkummar Rao enters the picture as the new tenant downstairs, all pressed linen shirts and polite, blinding smiles that immediately raise every alarm bell in Bobby's head. The script, written by Kanika Dhillon, sets up a classic cat-and-mouse dynamic where we are never quite sure if Rao’s Keshav is a sociopathic killer or just an exceptionally neat guy dealing with a paranoid neighbor who won't stop peeking through his blinds. Rao plays the gaslighting with a terrifying smoothness, leaning into that specific brand of suburban menace we haven't seen done this effectively since Manoj Bajpayee was in his absolute prime twenty years ago, smiling while he slowly tightens the screws on someone losing their grip.

Director Prakash Kovelamudi shoots the whole thing through a distorting lens of neon pinks and sickly greens, treating London streets like a funhouse mirror that reflects Bobby's scrambled brain chemistry. There are moments where the frame tilts so violently you feel like you are tumbling down the stairs right alongside her, and while it occasionally borders on visual motion sickness, it commits so fully to the subjective experience of mental illness that you forgive the excesses. The editing by Shan Mohammed matches this chaotic rhythm, cutting away from conversations half a beat too early just to leave you hanging in the quiet residue of a severed sentence, making sure the audience never feels entirely comfortable on solid ground.

Amyra Dastur pops up as Keshav's wife, a character written with so little room to breathe that she mostly exists to look decorative and scream at opportune moments, though she handles the physical demands of the third act with surprising grit. Hindi movies have traditionally struggled to integrate complex female antagonists or morally ambiguous victims without falling back on tired hysteria tropes, and while this movie occasionally stumbles into those exact pitfalls, it also claws its way back by letting its women be actively malicious rather than passively tormented. The soundtrack by Daniel B. George and others relies heavily on jarring industrial percussion that screeches to a halt whenever Bobby blinks, occasionally overdoing the sonic cueing but mostly anchoring the psychological turbulence in your chest.

Beneath the murder mystery mechanics and the twisty cat-and-mouse plotting, the film is really about the casual cruelty society reserves for anyone who doesn't process grief or trauma in an approved, orderly fashion. Everyone around Bobby treats her diagnosis as a license to ignore her testimony, turning her genuine terror into punchlines or police reports filed in the round file, which is a dynamic that feels far more real than any of the thriller plotting around it. When the violence finally erupts in a London kitchen during a blinding rainstorm, it feels less like a clean genre climax and more like two broken people smashing their respective delusions against each other until nothing is left standing.

It gets messy in the second half, losing its nerve for about twenty minutes while it tries to explain away plot holes with hasty exposition dumps that drag the energy right out of the room. I could have done without the redundant flashbacks explaining the childhood fire, because Ranaut's face already tells you everything you need to know about the lingering scars without spelling it out in voiceover. Still, it is a rare example of a mainstream studio financing a project where the hero is genuinely repellent for long stretches of runtime, asking the audience to root for someone who is loud, obnoxious, and frequently wrong about everything.

The tonal shifts are severe enough to give you whiplash, jumping from broad black comedy involving stray dogs and eccentric landlords to genuinely harrowing scenes of domestic stalking without bothering to tap the brakes. That lack of polish is precisely what keeps it interesting, refusing to smooth down the rough edges into a digestible product for the overseas market, standing as a reminder that messy ambition is almost always more fun to watch than sterile competence. If you can stomach the aggressive sound design and the occasional narrative dead end, there is a jagged, weirdly alive piece of cinema buried under all that neon paint.