The sound of a skull hitting a luggage rack with the wet crunch of a dropped melon is not something you shake off easily once the lights come up in the theater, and if I'm honest, it took me until the second tunnel sequence to realize I hadn't unclenched my jaw in twenty minutes. Nikhil Nagesh Bhat does not care about your comfort, which is immediately refreshing in a cinematic landscape that usually spends the first half-hour introducing you to the protagonist's dog and their cousin's wedding plans just to make sure you care when things inevitably go sideways. Instead, we are shoved onto a train bound for New Delhi before we even know where we parked the car, and the narrative economy is so tight it practically squeaks. The screenplay makes the express decision to spend very little time on pleasantries, trading exposition for a mounting pressure cooker environment where a young commando named Amrit, played with a bruised, thousand-yard stare by Lakshya, wants to propose to his girlfriend Tulika before her family marries her off to someone richer and duller. They meet on a sleeper car while the world outside smears into grey streaks of dust and scrub brush, and you can tell from the way the old man in the next bay looks at his pocket watch that the romantic getaway is going to be spectacularly short-lived.

Then the bandits climb aboard at a desolate stretch of track, forty-odd men armed with homemade knives, heavy chains, and an absolute commitment to ruining everyone's evening, turning a standard romantic melodrama into a rolling slaughterhouse that refuses to let off the gas. It is a premise that invites comparisons to The Raid, but Bhat shoots the confined corridors with a greasy, sweaty desperation that feels less like choreography and more like a massive bar fight where nobody brought a referee and everyone brought a grudge. The action direction by Se-yeong Oh deserves every bit of praise it's getting, yet it's the tiny details of spatial awareness that keep the violence grounded, like the way a heavy-duty fire extinguisher becomes a blunt instrument only after the handle has been repeatedly smashed against a bolted washroom door. Lakshya throws himself into these brawls with a total lack of vanity, getting his face shoved into dirty carpet and taking knees to the ribs that look entirely too real to be movie magic, moving through the narrow aisles like a man who has forgotten how to feel pain and only remembers how to break joints.

The bandits aren't just faceless cannon fodder either, because Raghav Juyal brings a twitchy, feral energy to his role as Fani, the younger brother of the gang's patriarch who treats the whole hijacking like an exceptionally violent game he is losing. Juyal smiles too much, his eyes darting around the carriage even while he is threatening to carve someone's ear off, and his performance gives the movie a greasy personality that prevents it from turning into a purely mechanical exercise in limb-snapping. He is genuinely repulsive, a petty, cowardly bully who hides behind his father's bulk until the knives come out, and his line delivery has this offhand, cruel casualness that makes you want to reach through the screen and choke him yourself. Tanya Maniktala, as Tulika, has the tougher job of playing the emotional anchor while being shoved from one terrifying corner to another, and while her character gets sidelined into damsel territory for the stretch run, she manages to inject enough quiet defiance into her glances that she never feels like a prop. The supporting cast features a few actors whose dubbing is slightly out of sync during the mid-film chaos, a small thing that bugged me every time a thug's mouth kept moving half a second after the grunt audio landed, but the sheer momentum of the train drowns out most technical nitpicks.

Where most recent Bollywood releases tend to pad their runtime with three distinct musical numbers and a superfluous comic relief track about uncles arguing over property lines, this film strips away the fat until there is nothing left except bone and sinew. The soundtrack by Clinton Cerejo and Sharang Sharma avoids the traditional romantic swelling, opting instead for industrial hums, low-frequency rumbles, and rhythmic percussion that mimics the clicking of iron rails beneath the wheels, driving the tension straight up into your throat. Cinematographer Rafey Mehmood keeps his camera wedged into spaces that feel entirely too tight for comfort, tilting through baggage compartments and panning across blood-spattered curtains with a restless energy that makes you feel like you are standing right in the aisle dodging flying glass and severed thumbs. There is a relentless geometry to the framing, using the overhead bunks and narrow sliding doors to trap both the characters and the audience in a visual vise that tightens every time someone manages to draw another breath. It is a bold way to shoot a genre film in a country where hindi movies have historically relied on wide, sweeping emotional canvases to tell their stories, proving that you can squeeze just as much drama out of a twenty-inch aisle as you can out of a sprawling family estate.

Underneath the arterial spray and the bone-cracking sound design, there is a simple, furious study in escalation, tracking how quickly a civilized society breaks down into tribal survival when the brakes are pulled and the doors are locked from the outside. The passengers are initially paralyzed by politeness and social hierarchy, whispering about not making a scene while the old men have their gold chains snatched, but as the body count climbs, the veneer of modern civility peels away to reveal something much uglier and much older. Amrit's transformation from a disciplined protector into a cold-blooded executioner doesn't feel like a heroic arc; it feels like a slow rotting of the soul, each severed tendon and crushed windpipe stripping away another layer of his humanity until he is just another animal with a sharp piece of metal. Hindi films have explored revenge before, but rarely with this kind of unblinking focus on the physical cost of payback, showing how the blood gets under your fingernails and stays there long after the screaming has stopped. The movie doesn't offer any grand moral takeaways about the nature of violence or the decay of modern youth, choosing instead to stay down in the dirt with the broken glass and the puddles of lukewarm soda.

There are moments during the second hour where the sheer volume of trauma threatens to become numbing, a common trap for movies that rely entirely on sustained high-velocity carnage to keep the pulse elevated. Yet just when you think you have seen every possible permutation of a knife going into a torso, Bhat finds a fresh, agonizing angle in the corner of a pantry car or behind a folding table. The pacing never drags, which is an achievement in itself considering ninety percent of the narrative takes place inside the identical metal tubes of rolling stock cars hurtling through the dark. By the time the train finally slows down to a crawl near the destination, you feel like you've been dragged across five hundred miles of gravel behind the locomotive, bruised, battered, and entirely exhausted. It is a dirty, mean, effective piece of genre filmmaking that respects the audience's stamina enough to keep punching until the very last frame drops away into black.