There is a specific kind of gravelly, low-end hum in the sound mix during the opening minutes of Anek that immediately signals this isn't going to be your standard Bollywood release where the hero gets a slow-motion intro to a brass-heavy theme song. Director Anubhav Sinha has spent the last few years taking a sledgehammer to the polite, glossy escapism of mainstream Hindi movies, trading romance for hard-hitting sociopolitical drama that often feels more like an editorial board meeting written with guns and tear gas. If I'm honest, the sheer amount of exposition crammed into the first twenty minutes nearly gave me whiplash, dumping geographic acronyms and factional acronyms on the audience with the grace of a Wikipedia page being read aloud by an auctioneer. But once the dust settles and the narrative actually touches down in the troubled terrain of the Northeast, the film finds a strange, bruising rhythm that sticks to your ribs long after the credits cut to black.

Ayushmann Khurrana plays Joshua, an undercover operative whose actual name and allegiances are about as stable as a house of cards built on a trampoline. Khurrana strips away all the amiable, middle-class vulnerability that made his earlier hits so endearing, replacing it with a flat, weary stare that suggests a man who has forgotten what a home-cooked meal tastes like. He moves through the frame like he's carrying forty pounds of damp laundry in a garbage bag, shoulders permanently hiked up toward his ears, reacting to violence not with cinematic rage but with the exhausted sigh of an employee dealing with a broken photocopier. It's a remarkably unflashy performance that stands in sharp contrast to his work in Article 15, refusing to give the audience a grand emotional breakthrough or a tearful monologue about the state of the nation. He just does the job, looks tired, and occasionally takes a punch that sounds uncomfortably real.

Opposite him, Andrea Kevichüsa anchors the film's emotional gravity as Aido, a local boxer whose ambitions are constantly boxed in by the checkpoints, racial slurs, and military curfews that dictate daily life around her. Kevichüsa has this quiet, devastating intensity that makes most of the seasoned character actors sharing the screen with her look like they're trying just a bit too hard to hit their dramatic marks. Her scenes in the boxing ring aren't edited with the frantic, disorienting cuts you usually see in sports dramas; instead, the camera hangs back, letting the dull thud of leather hitting ribs fill the quiet spaces between dialogue. Yet, it's a small thing, but the sound design during these training montages occasionally loops the exact same grunt for three punches in a row, and once you notice it, you can't unhear it. It's a minor annoyance in an otherwise meticulously textured audio landscape.

The cinematography by Ewan Mulligan deserves a special mention for refusing to romanticize the lush green hills and misty valleys of the shooting locations into a tourist board advertisement. Mulligan shoots the landscape through a desaturated, iron-gray lens that turns breathtaking vistas into claustrophobic cages, using long lenses to compress the background until the mountains feel like they are physically crushing the characters. There's an extended tracking shot through a crowded market during a sudden riot that is genuinely breathtaking in its logistical chaos, bodies surging and colliding around the actors without a single obvious cut to let you catch your breath. The score by Anurag Saikia matches this visual anxiety with low cello drones and sudden, sharp percussion bursts that avoid the usual bombastic trap of orchestral chest-beating, keeping the tension humming underneath even the quietest dialogue scenes.

Sinha's screenplay tries to bite off an enormous chunk of contemporary geopolitical history, tackling everything from peace accords and separatist insurgencies to mainland prejudice and the psychological toll of institutionalized discrimination. It's a dense, sprawling narrative that sometimes buckles under the weight of its own ambition, occasionally turning its characters into walking mouthpieces for opposing political viewpoints rather than flesh-and-blood humans. You can feel the screenwriter's hand a bit too heavily in scenes where characters sit in dimly lit rooms and explain the history of the region to each other like professors addressing a freshman seminar. But Hindi cinema rarely touches stories from this part of the country with this level of sustained, unblinking attention, and even when the political messaging gets a bit too on-the-nose, the conviction behind it remains entirely unshakeable.

What ultimately saves the film from becoming just another lecture on celluloid is its refusal to offer up a neat, satisfying resolution where the good guys win and the bad guys get hauled away in handcuffs. The ending is messy, ambiguous, and deeply frustrating in a way that feels deliberately earned by everything that came before it, leaving characters standing in the rain with nothing resolved except their own bruised survival. It's not a comfortable watch, and it certainly won't win over anyone who goes to the movies strictly for popcorn thrills and catchy dance numbers. But it leaves a mark, and sometimes that's all a bruised, complicated piece of storytelling needs to do to justify its existence.