Sunil Grover wears a silver jacket that looks like it cost four hundred rupees at a roadside stall in Linking Road, and honestly, that jacket does more heavy lifting for his character's entire financial backstory than three pages of dialogue ever could. Hindi films have this weird obsession with making every minor criminal look like either a mafia don straight out of a glossy magazine or a starving orphan, but Grover’s character in Blackout feels like a guy who just wandered off a local train at Dadar station because he missed his stop and decided to rob a jewelry car instead. It's a small thing, but that tacky silver sheen catching the streetlights during the film's endless driving sequences bugged me right from the opening reel. We spend two hours watching him sweat through that synthetic fabric while driving a battered hatchback through the wet night streets of Gurgaon, and every time the camera catches the reflection of the dashboard lights on his shoulders, you can practically smell the cheap deodorant. Most Bollywood movies would have dressed him in sharp black leather to look cool or dirty rags to look poor, but director Devang Shashin Bhavsar lets him look like an ordinary, slightly desperate guy who made a catastrophically stupid career choice on a Tuesday afternoon.

Vikrant Massey plays the kind of flustered, middle-class everyman he has essentially perfected across half a dozen streaming platforms, running around with eyes wide and a perpetual half-swallow in his throat, reacting to dead bodies and sacks of cash with the specific panic of someone who just realized he left the kitchen gas on while boarding an out-of-station train. He is good at this, obviously, because nobody does modern anxiety quite like him in current Hindi cinema, though there are stretches where the screenplay just makes him repeat the exact same physical gag of dropping things and whispering obscenities under his breath. The direction leans heavily on chaotic nocturnal energy, throwing characters into absurd, interlocking car accidents and accidental lootings without giving them a moment to breathe or plan. It wants to be Delhi Belly with a supernatural or at least deeply bizarre supernatural-adjacent twist involving a massive traffic pile-up and a stolen car full of black money, but the pacing keeps stuttering every time Mouni Roy shows up on screen to deliver lines that sound like they were recorded in an empty water tank three weeks after the shoot wrapped.

Her dubbing is distractingly out of sync during at least three crucial confrontation scenes, and it completely pulls you out of the frantic momentum the film spends twenty minutes building up. It’s strange because Roy actually has a sharp, slightly cynical screen presence when she’s just allowed to stand there looking unimpressed, but whoever handled the post-production sound on her dialogue track must have been working on a broken laptop with their eyes closed. The script keeps throwing these three actors together in cramped interiors, forcing them to bounce off each other while a deadpan narrator chimes in with observations about fate and bad luck that belong in a completely different, much cornier movie from the nineties.

The cinematography by Chirantan Das deserves some credit for making the Gurgaon expressway look genuinely claustrophobic, shooting the endless lines of tail-lights and damp asphalt like a glowing neon cage rather than just a generic backdrop for night scenes. Every street corner has that sickly green sodium-vapor glow that makes everyone look slightly seasick, which fits the moral rot of the plot nicely enough without rubbing your face in it. Yet the soundtrack keeps dropping these jaunty, quirky jazz cues every time a character pulls a gun or trips over a corpse, and the tonal clash gets exhausting before the first forty minutes have even ticked past. You want the movie to either commit to being a dark, bloody farce or lean into the slapstick, but it stays stuck in this awkward middle zone where people are screaming in terror while jaunty basslines bounce along like we're watching a cartoon chase in an old comedy.

There is an underlying anxiety about modern urban anonymity running through the whole mess, this idea that you can run over a criminal's loot-filled vehicle on a flyover and your entire life as an insurance agent or a petty thief can unravel in one rainy evening without anyone in the high-rises looking down to notice. Massey's character represents that exhausted corporate grind where everyone is one bad traffic stop away from a total nervous breakdown, which feels grounded enough even when the plot goes completely off the rails with gangsters and hidden loot bags. It feels like a standard streaming filler project designed to play in the background while people scroll through their phones on a Sunday afternoon, full of bright ideas about greed and cosmic irony that it never quite knows how to resolve once the sun starts coming up over the highway.

By the time the third act rolls around, the characters are just yelling at each other in an abandoned warehouse or a parking garage, running in circles until the budget presumably ran out and forced everyone to wrap up the narrative with a rushed confrontation that solves absolutely nothing. Sunil Grover gets one great deadpan line about the price of gold that almost makes you forgive the forty minutes of pointless car chases that preceded it, but the movie fades out on a freeze-frame that feels less like an artistic choice and more like the editors just gave up trying to cut the final scene together.