Kabir Grewal wears a lot of turtlenecks in Roy. Not great, not bad, just there, hanging off Arjun Rampal's frame while he stares out of floor-to-ceiling windows in a Malaysian villa that looks like a high-end architectural catalog exploded. I spent the first twenty minutes trying to figure out if his character was supposed to be a genius filmmaker or just a very wealthy man who took up writing crime capers as a hobby because he was bored on a Tuesday afternoon. He directs movies about a smooth thief named Roy, which is already a meta-textual headache before you factor in that the thief scenes look exactly like the Kabir scenes except with a blue color grade slapped over the lens. It is the kind of slick, expensive-looking setup that Bollywood movies used to throw at audiences when they wanted to feel international without actually bothering with things like character motivation or narrative momentum. Ranbir Kapoor pops up later as the actual thief Roy, floating through rain-slicked European streets with a permanent expression of mild annoyance, like a man who realized he left his stove on back in Mumbai but can't be bothered to turn around and check it. The whole thing moves at the speed of a glacier sliding across a very polished marble floor, taking its sweet time to get absolutely nowhere while Anupam Kher pops in as a producer who exists purely to sigh heavily and remind Kabir that he owes the studio a script. Vikramjit Singh directs this mess with the unwavering confidence of a man who has never been told no by an editor, letting scenes linger for three or four beats past their expiration date just so we can admire how the light hits Jacqueline Fernandez's cheekbones as she paints canvases that look like they were bought at a airport duty-free shop.

The screenplay feels less like a finished draft and more like a collection of mood boards that someone dropped in a puddle and tried to dry out with a hair dryer. Kabir has writer's block, which in this cinematic universe means he sits in dim rooms holding a glass of amber liquid and brooding so hard the furniture looks uncomfortable. Then he meets Ayesha, played by Fernandez, who is also a filmmaker, because apparently every single person in this world makes movies for a living. They fall into a romance that is so thoroughly devoid of chemistry it actually loops back around to being mildly fascinating, a masterclass in two attractive people standing near each other while zero sparks fly, reminding me of that stretch in Bombay Velvet where everybody just stared at retro lampshades and whispered. The parallel track involves Kapoor's Roy stealing art while falling for another woman also played by Fernandez, because apparently Kabir is writing his own messy love life directly into his heist scripts, a creative choice that raises serious ethical questions about artistic integrity and plagiarism of one's own subconscious. The dialogue consists mostly of people saying things like life is like a canvas and then pausing for four seconds while ambient synth music swells to tell us we are supposed to feel something profound about art imitating existence. It is deeply exhausting stuff, wrapped in designer coats and shot with a soft-focus lens that makes every single frame look like a perfume commercial designed to sell you an expensive weekend getaway you cannot afford.

Ranbir Kapoor sleepwalks through his role with an elegance that almost fools you into thinking he has an inner life, though mostly he just seems mildly inconvenienced by the plot mechanics dragging him from one picturesque European alleyway to the next. He wears hats. He looks at paintings. He steals a diamond or a painting or something shiny, the exact object never really mattering because the heist itself is treated as an afterthought to the mood lighting. Arjun Rampal fares slightly better simply because his entire job is to look like a man who has not slept in three days and is questioning every life choice that led him to this specific Malaysian balcony, a performance that requires very little heavy lifting and suits his natural resting expression quite well. Jacqueline Fernandez pulls double duty as the muse in both the real world and the fictional script, which mostly means she changes outfits five times per scene and maintains a look of serene, slightly vacant detachment that suggests she is thinking about what she is going to have for dinner after wrap. Anupam Kher shows up to shout some exposition, collects his check, and vanishes back into the mist, leaving the younger actors to drift through the gorgeous wreckage of a plot that refuses to ignite no matter how many times the director cuts to a close-up of a brooding face in front of a rainy window.

Visually, the film is an unbroken stream of glossy visuals that cost a fortune and mean precisely nothing, all amber tones and midnight blues, with Verma Malik's cinematography doing the heavy lifting that the script abandoned in the first act. Every frame is composed like an ad for a luxury watch, which gets grating about forty-five minutes in when you realize nobody is ever going to speak above a low, resonant murmur about the nature of human longing. Then there is the music, specifically the song Sooraj Dooba Hain, which plays during a montage and is catchy enough that you will find yourself humming it while brushing your teeth, except the movie plays instrumental versions, background vocal snippets, and full-length reprises of it roughly fourteen times until you want to throw your popcorn bucket at the screen. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how every emotional beat relies entirely on Amaal Mallik and Ankit Tiwari's soundtracks to do the heavy lifting of telling us we are watching a romance instead of two mannequins sharing spatial awareness. The editing by Aarif Sheikh tries valiantly to stitch these two parallel storytelling tracks together into something resembling a coherent shape, but it keeps getting distracted by long, lingering reaction shots of Arjun Rampal staring pensively into empty space while a saxophone wails on the soundtrack.

Hindi films have a long and honorable tradition of indulging in self-reflexive metanarratives about artists and their creations, but this particular entry forgets that audiences actually need a reason to care about the artist or the creation. The thematic core attempts to explore how creators manipulate their muses and write themselves into corners they cannot escape, yet it treats these ideas with the depth of a motivational quote posted on an Instagram stories slide. Kabir talks endlessly about control and narrative arcs, but the film itself has zero control over its own narrative arc, wandering off down side alleys of philosophical mumbo-jumbo whenever it realizes it has nothing left to say about love or art. It wants to be an intellectual puzzle box of a thriller, the kind of thing where you leave the theater debating the nature of reality and fiction, but it is actually just a very long, very pretty music video for people who find regular movies too complicated to follow. When the third act finally stumbles toward its resolution, it wraps everything up with a hasty, unearned sentimental flourish that feels bolted on by a studio executive who realized they needed the audience to stop looking at their watches before the credits rolled.

There is an ambition here that deserves some baseline respect, even if the execution completely face-plants into the decorative cushions of that Malaysian villa. You can tell everyone involved thought they were making something sophisticated, something that would push Hindi movies past their usual song-and-dance formula into the chilly, high-concept waters of European art-house cinema. But ambition without a pulse is just a very expensive paperweight, and Roy sits there on the screen, heavy and lifeless and draped in designer knitwear, daring you to stay awake through yet another slow-motion walk down a cobbled street. Kapoor looks bored, Rampal looks tired, and the audience is left wondering why nobody thought to check if the script actually had a middle before they started shooting the scenery. It is a cinematic museum piece, all glass cases and polite lighting, housing a void where a story should be.