Amit Sadh clears his throat four minutes into the film with a sound so wet and irritated it makes you adjust your posture in the seat. It is a small thing, but it bugged me, mostly because he does it three more times before anyone even mentions the highway. Indian cinema has spent the last decade trying to outrun the ghost of the multiplex thriller, polishing every surface until grease and sweat look like post-production decisions, but Pune Highway drags you right back into the sticky upholstery of a mid-budget car where things smell like stale cigarettes and cheap dashboard vanilla. Rahul Da Cunha and Bugs Bhargava Krishna share the directorial credit here, and you can feel the theater backgrounds bleeding through the seams of every shot, the actors occasionally playing to a balcony that isn't quite there yet. The premise relies on that old noir comfort food where two men who probably shouldn't be in the same room are forced into a confined space while a secret decays between them like a forgotten sandwich in the glove box. Screenplays written by committee usually smell like whiteboards and fear, yet this one manages to sound remarkably like the kind of conversation you overhear at an airport bar when someone is trying to explain why their startup failed without mentioning the words police or embezzlement.

Jim Sarbh brings an energy that reminds you of his work in Neerja, all nervous twitches and vocal inflections that dance around the edges of the room like a wasp trapped behind a dusty windowpane, though he here adopts a slower, more deliberate cadence that almost feels like he is reading his lines from a teleprompter located slightly behind your left ear. He plays off Sadh with a kind of weary friction that bypasses traditional buddy-movie beats, refusing to give you the satisfaction of a clear power dynamic shifting back and forth between alpha and beta. Anuvab Pal wanders into the frame with the bewildered air of a man who took a wrong turn looking for the green room and decided to stay for the craft services, his dialogue delivery hitting that specific spot between amateur theatre and professional exhaustion where you cannot quite tell if he is improvising or just deeply confused. The camera operators seem to have been hired on the condition that they never let the actors settle into a comfortable two-shot, constantly hunting for tight angles that turn noses and cheekbones into topographical maps of guilt.

Bollywood movies have long had a complicated relationship with the open road, usually treating national highways as either romantic backdrops for song sequences or existential voids where heroes find God between Mumbai and Goa, but this film strips all that cinematic gloss away to reveal something that looks closer to an Uber ride with a driver who has a very low tolerance for bad feedback. The soundtrack leans heavily on low-frequency drones that occasionally mistake themselves for actual music, rumbling beneath the dialogue like an intestine digesting bad highway dhaba food, and while it creates atmosphere, it also makes it nearly impossible to catch half of Pal's muttered punchlines. Lighting choices are similarly ungenerous, preferring the sickly yellow glow of roadside tube lights over any flattering three-point setup, which means you spend a lot of time squinting at the actors' foreheads while they argue about money they don't have.

There is a specific kind of claustrophobia that only happens in sedans on Indian asphalt, that unique mix of air conditioning failing on the left side while humidity pours in through a cracked window, and the directors capture this texture better than they capture the plot logic. Thematic ambitions surface every twenty minutes or so, usually disguised as a monologue about middle-class aspiration turning sour, but these moments land with a dull thud compared to the sheer physical annoyance of watching two guys bicker over who forgot to pay the toll. Hindi films rarely trust silence unless someone is dying or staring at a sunset, which makes the long stretches where nobody talks inside this particular car feel almost radical, even if those silences are mostly filled by the sound of cheap tires hitting the rumble strips.

Sadh uses his bulk like a weapon, slouching into the passenger seat as if he is trying to burrow through the floorboards to escape the scene entirely, while Sarbh remains upright, rigid, almost vibrating with a strange corporate panic that feels entirely too familiar if you have ever sat through a pitch meeting with venture capitalists who started doing keto. The narrative structure folds in on itself during the second act, abandoning tension for extended sequences of character backstory that belong in a different, much more boring domestic drama about property disputes in Bandra. No one involved seems terribly interested in wrapping things up neatly, and the third act dissolves into a muddy blur of night driving and shouting matches that leave you wondering if the budget simply ran out before they could film a proper ending. It's not great, not bad, just there, idling in neutral while the meter runs up.