Pankaj Tripathi plays a man with a wooden leg in a scene that lasts roughly four seconds and tells you absolutely nothing about the plot, which is typical for how Srijit Mukherji chooses to open a movie about rural poverty and state apathy. You spend the first fifteen minutes waiting for the shoe to drop, metaphorically speaking, because the pacing feels less like a narrative and more like a series of long sighs caught on a decent microphone. If I'm honest, the opening third drags its feet so heavily in the mud of its own premise that you start checking your watch to see how long you have been staring at sugarcane fields. The premise is based on a real news story from Uttar Pradesh where impoverished villagers sent their elderly relatives into tiger reserves so their families could claim government compensation after a fatal attack, which sounds like black comedy on paper but plays out with an exhausting, literal-minded sincerity that refuses to crack a smile. Mukherji shoots the village scenes with a kind of flat, sun-bleached indifference that strips the landscape of any romantic notions about rural life while simultaneously making it visually monotonous to sit through for two hours. The color grading leans heavily into washed-out yellows and dusty browns that make every frame look like it was left on the dashboard of a Maruti 800 during a heatwave. It is a stylistic choice, sure, but it wears out its welcome long before the second reel.

Then Tripathi enters as Gangaram, and the film recalibrates entirely around his specific, singular rhythm of speech. He mumbles, he trails off, he uses pauses not for dramatic tension but because he genuinely seems to be thinking about what to say next while the camera watches him blink. There is a magnificent sequence where he argues with his wife about selling a goat, and his performance avoids every single theatrical trap a lesser actor would have fallen into when dealing with rural destitution. He does not play Gangaram as a noble peasant or a pathetic victim of circumstance, choosing instead to inhabit a man who is simply tired of doing the math on how many days his family can survive on lentils. Neeraj Kabi shows up as a cynical forest officer who has seen every bureaucratic trick in the book and smells the desperation on Gangaram almost immediately. Their scenes together have a prickly, sharp-elbowed energy that rescues the middle stretch from the narrative doldrums it so eagerly wanders into. Kabi doesn't need to chew the scenery to dominate the frame; he just narrows his eyes, adjusts his khaki cap, and lets the terrifying weight of institutional indifference do all the heavy lifting.

Sayani Gupta gets saddled with the trickiest role as Gangaram’s sharp-tongued wife, Kalawati, who has to balance the impossible burden of being the voice of domestic reason in a household that is actively planning a murder-suicide for a paycheck. Gupta uses her eyes to convey a furious, exhausted pragmatism that speaks volumes even when the script gives her lines that feel a bit too much like a social work pamphlet. Hindi films have a long and tedious history of reducing rural women to either wailing sufferers or salt-of-the-earth philosophers, and while Gupta escapes that trap through sheer force of will, the dialogue occasionally lets her down by spelling out themes that were already landing quite clearly through her facial expressions. There is a supporting actor playing a local politician who is so clearly dubbed in post-production that his mouth movements rarely match the audio track, and it is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time he appeared on screen to deliver expository filler about election dates and compensation quotas. The sound design also relies far too heavily on a recurring flute motif that drops in whenever the tiger is mentioned, as if the audience wouldn't quite grasp the danger without a gentle musical nudge.

The thematic ambitions of the movie are genuinely interesting, even when the storytelling stumbles over its own feet to reach them. It treats the government compensation scheme not as a system to be gamed out of pure malice, but as an actuarial calculation made by people who would rather pay out blood money to poor families than fix the underlying economic rot that drove them there in the first place. You can see the ghost of Shyam Benegal’s work hovering around the edges of these sequences, though Mukherji lacks the patient, observational rigor that made those older dramas feel like lived history rather than message-driven cinema. The satire bites hard when it focuses on the paperwork, the forms in triplicate, the thumb impressions, the endless waiting rooms where minor bureaucrats treat human tragedy with the weary boredom of postal workers sorting junk mail. Yet whenever the narrative moves away from the bureaucracy and into the forest, it loses its footing and starts wandering around in circles looking for a profound thought that never quite materializes under the canopy.

By the time Gangaram is wandering through the bushes waiting for a Bengal tiger to end his financial struggles, the movie has already made its point three times over, but it stubbornly keeps going anyway. The cinematography by Indranil Mukherjee captures the claustrophobia of the tall grass with admirable grit, but after forty minutes of tracking shots through identical patches of foliage, you start longing for a wide-angle shot that isn't choked by sugarcane stalks. Bollywood movies usually treat nature as either a scenic backdrop for romantic songs or a CGI playground for action heroes, so it is refreshing to see a Hindi film where the forest is just a damp, hot, buggy place where poor people go to die for a few lakhs of rupees. Tripathi holds the whole shaky enterprise together with a performance that deserves to be remembered long after the specific plot mechanics of this Pilibhit saga fade from memory. He makes you care about a man whose primary motivation is simply wanting his children to have a concrete roof over their heads, even if the price of that roof is his own digestion by a wild animal. The film stops dead on a close-up of his face, refusing to offer a neat resolution or a comforting moral takeaway about the sanctity of life versus the brutal math of poverty, which is probably the most honest thing it does all the way through.