Nawazuddin Siddiqui spends the first ten minutes of Raman Raghav 2 eating a stolen apple with a pocket knife that looks like it came out of a rusted drawer in a railway station waiting room, and if I am honest, that detail stayed with me longer than any of the psychoanalytical justifications the script tries to staple to his forehead later on. Anurag Kashyap has always been drawn to the kind of dirt that doesn't wash out with soap, the grease under the fingernails of a city that smells like diesel and stale sweat, but here he strips away even the propulsive, operatic momentum that carried Gangs of Wasseypur through its three-hour runtime. This is a lean, mean, occasionally exhausting crawl through the gutters of Mumbai night-soil, shot on digital cameras that give the shadows a sickly, bruised magenta tint which looks less like professional grading and more like the screen of a cracked smartphone found in an alleyway.

The screenplay, co-written by Kashyap and Vasan Bala, takes the historical template of the notorious late-sixties serial killer Raman Raghav and drags him kicking and screaming into the neon-drenched, garbage-strewn underbelly of contemporary suburban sprawl, dropping all pretense of period reconstruction in favor of a raw, immediate street-level grime. It moves in fits and starts, abandoning narrative arcs just as they seem to be gaining traction, preferring instead to linger on the dead air between murders where the characters just sit around sweating in cramped, poorly ventilated rooms while ceiling fans rattle on rusted hinges. There is a certain structural instability to the way the scenes collide against one another, sometimes cutting away abruptly before a confrontation has reached its narrative apex, leaving the viewer hanging over a void of unresolved tension that feels genuinely disorienting rather than merely clever.

Siddiqui plays Ramanna with a terrifying, loose-limbed casualness, his eyes darting behind thick spectacles like trapped insects while he explains his theology of murder to anyone unfortunate enough to be trapped in a room with him, though it is Vicky Kaushal as Raghavan, the corrupt, cocaine-addled cop obsessed with his own reflection, who anchors the film's moral vacuum. Kaushal plays him with a dead-eyed, twitchy arrogance that feels entirely removed from the earnest heroism he would later specialize in, wearing his uniform like a cheap suit he bought off a corpse and sweating through his dress shirts with a frantic, desperate energy. Their parallel tracks never quite form the neat cat-and-mouse dynamic standard genre convention demands, sliding instead into a strange, mutually destructive codependency that feels less like Heat and more like two rabid dogs snapping at each other through a chain-link fence.

Vicky Kaushal's teeth-grinding, jaw-clenching cop routine gets a bit repetitive around the middle hour, every single interior scene featuring him staring into a bathroom mirror while techno music thumps through the walls, and honestly, that particular visual cliché has been beaten to death across a thousand Hindi movies over the last decade. It is a small thing, sure, but when a film relies so heavily on the internal decay of its lawman protagonist, seeing him do the exact same paranoid mirror-stare for the fourth time takes the air right out of the tires. Sobhita Dhulipala, meanwhile, brings a bruised, exhausted realism to her role as Raghavan's girlfriend Simmy, trapped in an apartment that looks like a storage unit for broken dreams, delivering her lines with a flat, defeated affect that cuts through the surrounding theatricality like a shard of glass.

The cinematography by Jay Oza embraces the kind of digital video smear that most directors spend millions trying to hide, turning the crowded slums and sterile police lockups into a single, continuous smear of sickly yellow sodium lights and deep, digital blacks that swallow the edges of the frame whole. Ram Sampath’s soundtrack avoids the usual thumping orchestral cues that telegraph emotional beats in commercial Hindi films, opting instead for a minimalist, metallic drone that sounds like a refrigerator motor dying in an empty kitchen at three in the morning. It hums underneath the dialogue, vibrating through the floorboards of the cinema until you feel it in your teeth, refusing to let you relax even during the quietest domestic scenes where nothing is actually happening.

What saves the project from becoming just another exercise in torture porn is its weird, twisted sense of humor, which bubbles up in moments of absurd domesticity where Ramanna pauses a killing spree to haggle over the price of a second-hand jacket or complain about the quality of local tea. This black comedy prevents the violence from feeling grandiose, reducing it to the level of petty crime and municipal failure, aligning the serial killer not with some mythic cinematic monster but with the ordinary, grinding corruption of the city around him. It shares a certain spiritual DNA with Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, particularly in the way both films treat their respective metropolises as open sewers that breed their own cleansing plagues, though Kashyap lacks Scorsese's classical sense of composition, substituting raw, jagged editorial energy for architectural grace.

The central thematic engine revolves around the idea of guilt as a contagious disease, suggesting that the cop and the killer are simply two different manifestations of the same societal rot, breathing the same polluted air and drinking the same chemically treated water. Yet the film smartly refuses to offer any comforting resolutions, leaving its characters stranded in their own personal hells without so much as a symbolic redemption arc to soften the blow for an audience looking for a neat moral takeaway. The final confrontation on a desolate stretch of highway doesn't feel like a climax so much as an administrative error, a messy, anti-climactic punctuation mark on a story that could just as easily have kept spinning its wheels in the mud for another two hours.

There is an unevenness to the pacing that will alienate viewers who prefer their thrillers with a clear trajectory, since whole narrative threads involving Ramanna's family and local gang politics are introduced only to be dropped without a backward glance as soon as the director gets bored with them. That lack of discipline is both the film's primary flaw and its saving grace, keeping the viewer permanently off-balance in a way that calculated, studio-vetted projects never manage to achieve, even if it leaves you wishing for a sharper pair of scissors in the editing suite.

When the screen finally goes black, there is no grand thematic synthesis waiting in the dark, just the lingering impression of Siddiqui’s thin, cruel smile hovering in the empty space where the projection used to be, reminding you that monsters don't live in haunted houses on the edge of town, they live right next door and borrow your matches.