There is a specific kind of sweat that comes from sitting in a Delhi basement while the power flickers, and director Agneya Singh captures it better than anyone who has ever tried to shoot youth culture in the capital without making it look like a glossy commercial for sunglasses or an after-school special about the dangers of the streets. If I'm honest, the first twenty minutes feel like you walked into the middle of a film studies major's thesis project that was funded entirely by rich parents and a stubborn refusal to edit down to the bone, but then something shifts in the cadence of the dialogue and you find yourself leaning forward despite the sprawl. It is messy in the way that twenty-four hours are messy when you have ingested too much bad caffeine and worse hash, dragging itself through greasy cafes and damp college rooms where nobody ever quite says what they mean because saying it would require admitting that their entire worldview is built on borrowed paperback philosophy and parental allowance money. When you stack this against something like Dev.D, which burns through its misery with a stylistic fury that leaves scorch marks on the screen, Singh's approach feels almost frustratingly casual, wandering off into conversations about nothing in particular just as you think a plot point is about to emerge from the haze.

Raaghav Chanana plays Figo with a perpetual half-sneer that suggests he has read one too many Baudrillard essays and decided that nothing matters except the next joint and looking sufficiently bored while smoking it, which could easily become unbearable if Ira Dubey were not right there to puncture his self-satisfied gloom with a sharper, more jittery kind of desperation. They are hunting for a mythical strain of hash called M Cream, rumored to be hidden somewhere in the mountains of Himachal Pradesh, though the trip itself quickly stops being about the product and turns into a slow-motion unraveling of their fragile little social circle as the altitude sickness and the paranoia set in. Dubey manages to make Jay, her character, feel lived-in and abrasive in a way that female leads in Hindi films are rarely allowed to be, dropping her voice into rough registers and refusing to look pretty even when the camera lingers on her face during a bad trip. There is a supporting player in the second act, some local dealer with teeth that look like broken chiclets, who is so obviously dubbed by a sound guy back in a Mumbai studio that it pulls you right out of the mountain air and drops you back onto a mixing stage, and it's a small thing but it bugged me every single time he opened his mouth.

The cinematography by Sidharth Jain deserves better than the muddy digital compression you get on streaming platforms, finding these dusty, amber-tinted pockets of Delhi that look like they haven't seen a fresh coat of paint since 1994, before transitioning into the blinding, bleached-out greens of the northern hills where every tree looks like it's judging you. Sound design relies heavily on ambient traffic hums, distant dogs barking in concrete alleyways, and a soundtrack that mixes indie rock with low-frequency drones that vibrate right behind your eyeballs if you have the bass turned up too high. Singh doesn't cut away from the silences, letting actors sit in awkward rooms for five seconds too long after an argument about privilege, forcing you to watch them fidget with their lighter caps or stare blankly at a water stain on the ceiling. This refusal to rush the rhythm is what separates the movie from the standard-issue rebellion narratives churning out of the commercial machinery of Bollywood movies, even if it means entire reels go by where nothing happens except people talking in circles about fascism and freedom while sharing a lukewarm bottle of Old Monk.

What the film is actually about is the vacuum left behind when you grow up wealthy in a country that is changing too fast for your politics to keep up with, leaving these kids to fight proxy wars against their fathers by getting high in picturesque valleys where the locals just want to charge them double for parathas. They talk about revolution with the earnest stupidity of college sophomores who have never missed a meal in their lives, and the script has the courage to let them look ridiculous without turning them into cartoons, which makes their posturing sting a little more if you recognize anyone you went to university with sitting in those frames. The narrative structure mirrors the drug use it chronicles, drifting off into lazy tangents about art and class before snapping back into moments of genuine cruelty where Figo says something so genuinely mean to Jay that you stop caring whether they find their legendary hash or not. Hindi cinema has spent decades treating rebels as either saints or martyrs, so seeing one that is just an entitled pest with a good vocabulary feels like a small, necessary correction, regardless of whether the audience has the patience for his whining.

There is no grand moral waiting at the end of the road, no sobering montage where everyone goes back to law school and cuts their hair, just a grey morning in the mountains where the fog refuses to clear and the tea tastes like tin. You are left with the distinct impression that these characters will go right back to their air-conditioned apartments and do the exact same thing next weekend, which makes the two-hour runtime feel either like an absolute waste of an evening or a rare piece of honest observation about a certain breed of urban youth who think apathy is a personality trait. When the credits finally roll over a scratchy guitar chord that doesn't resolve into a proper melody, you aren't sure if you liked the people you spent the last hundred minutes with, but you certainly wouldn't want to get stuck behind them in a traffic jam on the way to Kasol.