There is a specific kind of squint Shraddha Kapoor uses in Haseena Parkar that I am still trying to figure out, and not in a good way. She spends two hours narrowing her eyes against what appears to be a stiff wind blowing off the Arabian Sea, regardless of whether she is standing inside a heavily air-conditioned courtroom or sitting in a stuffy kitchen peeling potatoes. Aloo parathas, mostly. Lots of food preparation scenes that seem designed to make us feel the domestic weight of a woman whose brother was running half of Bombay from a telephone in Dubai.

Director Apoorva Lakhia has never been accused of subtlety, which is fine, because subtlety is rarely what you buy a ticket for when you walk into a multiplex on a Friday afternoon looking for a Hindi film that will keep the AC blowing on your neck for two and a half hours. But here he tackles the life of Haseena Parkar, the sister of Dawood Ibrahim, and he directs the proceedings with the visual flair of a mediocre corporate video commissioned by a regional municipality. The framing is flat, the camera moves with the sluggish predictability of a freight train on a rusted track, and the color grade looks like someone threw a heavy grey wool blanket over every single interior shot. It is aggressively drab. The screenplay by Suresh Nair tries to frame this whole thing as a courtroom drama that occasionally flashes back through decades of domestic misery and underworld expansion, which sounds structurally sound on paper until you realize the flashbacks have the narrative momentum of a wet sponge.

Shraddha Kapoor is cast against type, which is industry speak for wearing a lot of heavy prosthetic noses and dark brown contact lenses that make her look slightly startled by the presence of other human beings in the room. She tries hard. You can see the gears turning behind those wide, kohl-rimmed eyes as she attempts to project the heavy, simmering authority of a woman who became the uncontested godmother of Nagpada after her husband was gunned down by Arun Gawli’s men. Yet she never quite manages to shake off the eager-to-please posture of a pop star trying out for a serious acting conservatory. It is a performance made of external markers rather than internal combustion. She lowers her voice to a raspy whisper that is supposed to convey decades of quiet grief and terrifying power, but it mostly just sounds like she swallowed some dust during the morning commute. She sits in chairs with her shoulders hunched and her hands folded over her lap, looking less like a feared crime syndicate matriarch and more like a college theater student playing a grandmother in a one-act play about the partition.

Then you have Ankur Bhatia as Ibrahim Parkar, who gives us a masterclass in how to play a doomed movie husband by simply staring mournfully at walls while wearing pastel linen shirts that look like they belong in a second-tier Goa resort. His character exists entirely to be shot in slow motion while dramatic tabla beats kick in on the soundtrack, a sequence that Lakhia repeats at least three times across the runtime just in case we missed the tragic import of a man falling backward off a Vespa. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me: every time a character walks into a room in this movie, the score swells with these heavy, synth-brass chords that sound suspiciously like leftover stock audio from an unproduced Sanjay Dutt actioner from the nineties. And let us not talk about Siddhant Kapoor as Dawood Ibrahim. Real-life siblings playing on-screen siblings is a cute promotional hook for the morning talk shows, but it pays off with a performance that feels like an extended high school fancy dress competition where everyone forgot to buy the right moustache glue. Siddhant swaggers through his scenes with a phone glued to his ear, barking orders in a dialect that swings wildly between Mumbai street slang and polite high-school Urdu, never once suggesting the cold, calculated terror that made his real-life counterpart an international fugitive.

The cinematography by Prasad Sutar operates under the persistent delusion that turning down the exposure knob on the digital camera is a shortcut to gritty realism. Every street corner in Dongri looks like it was scrubbed clean with bleach and then sprayed down with cheap mineral oil to catch the harsh rim lighting. There is a relentless sheen over everything. Even the poverty looks like it was art-directed by an interior decorator who specializes in rustic chic, with copper pots gleaming in the background of dimly lit tenements while the poor characters talk in hushed tones about protection money and police raids. It feels less like an investigation into the machinery of organized crime in Mumbai and more like a Wikipedia page that has been stretched out over a hundred and twenty minutes through the sheer power of stubbornness.

What makes the whole enterprise genuinely frustrating is the central thesis, which floats somewhere between hagiography and tabloid sensationalism without ever committing to a coherent perspective on its subject. The film wants us to view Haseena as a helpless victim of patriarchal systems and bloodlines she never asked to inherit, a grieving mother caught between the ruthless ambition of her brother and the corrupt machinery of the Indian state. Yet it also expects us to cheer when she leans across a wooden desk to threaten a terrified real estate developer with physical violence. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot present a character as a domestic saint who just wanted to raise her kids and cook mutton biryani while simultaneously milking the audience’s appetite for gangster folklore. It leaves the movie suspended in a strange moral vacuum where nobody seems responsible for anything that happens, least of all the people writing the checks.

Indian cinema has a long and storied history of mob movies that actually understand the rot at the center of the underworld, stretching all the way from Satya to Company, where the violence felt corrosive and the moral compromises felt earned. Haseena Parkar lacks that internal pressure entirely. It is content to coast on the historical notoriety of its subjects while treating the narrative mechanics of a biographical drama like a checklist of required plot points: wedding, murder, courtroom, credits. There is a scene near the end where Kapoor has to deliver a long monologue about how she has been judged by a society that refuses to understand the burdens of a famous surname. She delivers it with her chin tucked into her chest, staring directly at the judge’s bench with a look of mild annoyance that suggests she is thinking about what is for lunch when the director calls cut. I found myself checking my watch during the climax, which is never a great sign when you are watching a woman supposedly face down the entire judicial apparatus of the state. It is an empty film about an empty life, constructed with just enough competence to keep you from walking out, but not enough imagination to make you glad you stayed.