That exact shade of synthetic indigo on the school blazer in the opening scene has been bothering me for twenty minutes. Emraan Hashmi plays Rakesh Singh, a man who doesn't look like a kingpin or a guru, just someone who found a very specific administrative loophole in the way young people desperate for a degree in a crowded country will pay anything to skip the line. He sits in plastic chairs. He drinks lukewarm tea from paper cups that are always slightly crushed around the rim. The movie wants to expose the education mafia in India, a lucrative cottage industry of proxy exam-takers, leaked question papers, and institutional rot. Yet it keeps getting distracted by the sheer audacity of its central grifter. Hashmi hasn't lost that specific street-level charisma he had back in his early musical thrillers, but here the charm is dried out, professionalized, and wearing a cheap polyester shirt. He is running a business where the commodity is intelligence, or rather the desperate illusion of it, packaged and sold to middle-class parents who have mortgaged their small-town futures for a merit rank. Soumik Sen directs with a sort of blunt-force pragmatism that doesn't care much about visual flair or establishing shots of cities, preferring instead the claustrophobia of coaching class offices and cramped living rooms where grandparents sleep within earshot of telephone negotiations.

The screenplay moves in fits and starts, occasionally abandoning whole narrative tracks for twenty minutes before remembering a character exists. Shreya Dhanwanthary plays Satyabhama, a bright college student caught in the orbit of this enterprise, and she brings a watchful stillness to scenes that otherwise threaten to devolve into shouting matches about meritocracy. Her performance keeps the second act from sliding entirely into melodrama. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how often the background score swelled up with electronic percussion every time someone walked down a corridor with a stack of papers, as if the director feared we might forget we were watching a corporate thriller about cheating. The pacing becomes erratic right around the interval point, lurching from intimate family dinners where parents discuss dowries and coaching fees to broad comedic sketches involving corrupt bureaucrats who look like they wandered in from an entirely different comedy.

There is a distinct lack of fat in Hashmi's acting choices these days, a deliberate stripping away of the smooth-talking seducer persona that made him famous in older Bollywood hits. He talks through his teeth. He counts notes without looking at them. When he argues with a university dean, he doesn't raise his voice or thump tables, which makes the threat far more credible than if he had delivered a grand speech about the systemic failure of the board examinations. Shibani Bedi shows up as his overworked sister-in-law, managing the domestic front of a criminal empire with the exhausted efficiency of someone running a corner grocery store. The film makes its points about the desperate hunger for professional degrees in a way that feels genuinely lived-in rather than ripped from prime-time debate shows, even if it occasionally loses its nerve and resorts to standard moralizing.

Cinematographer Alphonse Roy shoots the film in tones of mustard yellow and concrete grey, keeping the frame tight on faces and desk drawers. The editing by Bodhaditya Banerjee lets scenes breathe just a beat past the point of comfort, forcing us to watch characters process bad news in silence rather than cutting immediately to the next plot point. This is where the movie succeeds best, in those quiet zones of moral compromise where a father decides to pay forty lakhs for his daughter's medical seat because the alternative is watching her work at a call center for the rest of her life. Hindi cinema has always struggled to tackle middle-class corruption without turning it into farce or high tragedy, and while this project stumbles into both traps at various points, it never loses sight of the transaction at its core.

Memory is a strange thing when watching actors who have grown older alongside their audience, and seeing Hashmi navigate a role that requires him to be middle-aged, cynical, and utterly unromanticized brings to mind his performance in Shaheen Baig or similar gritty projects where the glamour is deliberately stripped away. You can see the effort he puts into not flashing that old trademark smile. The soundtrack by Rochak Kohli and others relies heavily on mid-tempo numbers that drift into the background without leaving much of an impression, functioning more as sonic wallpaper than narrative reinforcement. It is not great, not bad, just there, filling the dead air between dialogue exchanges about cutoff percentages and seat reservations.

The second half introduces a courtroom drama element that feels rushed and perfunctory, robbing the story of the grey-market ambiguity it spent two hours establishing. Courts in these stories rarely look like real legal spaces; they are stages where characters stand up to deliver thesis statements about the decay of public institutions. Yet even through these narrative stumbles, the core engine of the film remains fascinatingly bleak. Education isn't presented as an equalizer here, but as a luxury good, priced beyond the reach of genuine talent and sold to the highest bidder through back channels and greased palms. When the credits finally roll, there is no grand catharsis, no sweeping reform of the testing boards, no triumphant montage of honest students reclaiming their rightful places. The system is still churning out engineers and doctors who paid for every single answer on their board papers, and the man who sold them the answers is already looking for his next client.