There is a specific kind of panic that sets in roughly forty minutes into Nautanki Saala when you realize the guy sitting three rows behind you has stopped eating his popcorn and is just staring fixedly at the exit signs. If I'm honest, I get it. Rohan Sippy is working from a French farce here, specifically Pierre Salvadori's Apres Vous, and translating that kind of slippery, dialogue-heavy neurosis into the sprawling machinery of modern Hindi cinema always feels like trying to smuggle a very fragile, extremely drunk vase across a border in your carry-on luggage. You drop it once and you are just sweeping up shards while sweating through your shirt. The setup lands us right in the middle of a stage adaptation of Ramayan where Ayushmann Khurrana plays Ravan with a strange, frantic sort of commitment that suggests he might actually believe he lives in the play. He's Ram Parmar, a man who saves people by accident, which is worse than not saving them at all because it means he now has to stick around and watch them ruin their lives with even more enthusiasm than before. Enter Mandar Lele, played by Kunaal Roy Kapur with the physical presence of a wet mattress left out in a thunderstorm, threatening to hang himself from a ceiling fan because his girlfriend left him for a gym instructor or a florist or something equally pedestrian. Ram stops him. Ram takes him in. Ram immediately regrets every life choice that has brought him to this exact second of theatrical humiliation.

Kapur is doing something fascinating here that barely gets talked about in the usual chatter surrounding these commercial Hindi films, anchoring the entire enterprise in a kind of sweaty, unbearable neediness that makes you want to throw a heavy book at his head while simultaneously checking if he ate lunch. He doesn't play Mandar as a victim; he plays him as a parasite who genuinely believes he is a golden retriever. When he starts rearranging Ram’s apartment, scrubbing tiles with an intensity that borders on a psychotic break, you can see the exact moment Khurrana's eyes go dead behind the patient, well-meaning smile he uses for everyone he meets. It is a slow, grinding torture that both actors sell with a weary physicality. They aren't doing the usual loud, back-and-forth comic sparring you expect from a buddy comedy born out of Mumbai. They inhabit an awkward silence that stretches until the seams tear. Evelyn Sharma and Pooja Salvi show up to provide the requisite romantic complications, though they are mostly treated as interchangeable decorative objects in a messy bachelor pad that smells faintly of old socks and cheap incense. Gaelyn Mendonca pops in too, and there is a recurring ADR glitch during her first major confrontation scene where the audio sync slips by precisely three frames, which is a small thing that bugged me every single time it happened because once you see the mouth move after the sound comes out, you can never un-see it.

The cinematography by Manoj Lobo tries very hard to give the proceedings the glossy, sun-drenched look of an upscale apartment catalog, but the lighting inside Ram's theater has this flat, fluorescent glare that reminds you you are watching people sweat under studio lamps in Film City. It lacks the grease and texture of Delhi Belly, which is the unavoidable ghost haunting this entire production since Kapur was so thoroughly memorable in that film. Here, the tone keeps shifting gears without using the clutch. One minute we are watching a breezy musical number about heartbreak that features some genuinely clever choreography involving theater props, and the next we are trapped in a three-way conversation about codependency that feels like a therapy session conducted in a wind tunnel. The music, put together by a committee of composers including Rochak Kohli and Mikey McCleary, leans heavily on acoustic guitars and melancholy melodies that feel imported from an indie coffee shop in Bandra. It's a bit much during the scenes where Mandar is just sitting on a sofa eating toast, though the background score occasionally pulls back just enough to let the dead air do the heavy lifting.

What saves the whole project from collapsing into a standard mistaken-identity farce is its odd, cynical stance on the mechanics of selflessness. Ram Parmar is not a hero. He is an addict who needs to be needed, and Mandar is simply the dealer who finally brings enough product to ruin his domestic life with his actual partner. Most movies about male friendship in commercial cinema prefer to end with a misty-eyed hug on a railway platform or a drunken dance sequence under strobe lights. Sippy and his writers refuse that easy comfort, letting the final confrontation between the two leads play out in a dingy dressing room smelling of greasepaint and stale sweat. It is messy and unsatisfying and nobody learns a profound lesson about the true meaning of brotherhood. They just go back to their separate lives with slightly more baggage than they started with, which feels closer to how actual human disasters operate anyway.