Arshad Warsi pronounces the word "sharafat" in a way that makes you wonder if he’s holding back a laugh or about to spit, which is usually the exact moment Abhishek Chaubey’s camera decides to drift away from him and catch some old man in a dusty achkan staring blankly at a wall of fading family portraits. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me how often the sound design drops out completely just to let a heavy curtain rustle against a marble floor, treating silence like a punctuation mark it hasn't quite earned yet. We are back in the strange, mildewed demimonde of rural Uttar Pradesh where men quote Ghalib while hiding pistols in their waistbands, though nobody seems terribly interested in whether these pistols actually work when the trigger gets pulled. Hindi movies have long traded in this specific flavor of rustic menace, but Dedh Ishqiya doesn't lean on the usual loud machinery of the genre, preferring instead to let characters circle each other for twenty minutes in a high-ceilinged drawing room while someone slowly pours tea from a silver kettle that looks like it hasn't been polished since the British left.

Abhishek Chaubey directs with an odd, hesitant rhythm that feels less like a polished sequel and more like a director trying to remember where he left his car keys in a dark room full of valuable porcelain. The screenplay, co-written with Vishal Bhardwaj, takes structural detours that would give a screenwriting guru an absolute stroke, spending whole reels on poetry symposiums and elaborate cons that involve very little actual thievery and an awful deal of standing around on balconies reciting verse with heavy pauses between every second word. You get the sense they wanted to make something resembling a classic Urdu literary adaptation crossed with a C-grade caper flick, but they got so distracted by the texture of the carpets and the way the light hits Madhuri Dixit’s jhumkas that the plot sort of wanders off into the shrubbery around the intermission and never really finds its way back to the main road.

Madhuri Dixit carries herself through every frame with a heavy, deliberate slowness that suggests she’s performing underwater, which works wonderfully when she is supposed to be an enigmatic begum holding court in a decaying palace, but gets slightly weird when she has to react to Arshad Warsi cracking a crude joke about buffaloes. She has this way of narrowing her eyes just a fraction before delivering a line that makes you forget for a second that her dialogue sounds like it was translated from a 19th-century pamphlet on etiquette by someone who hadn't slept in three days. Naseeruddin Shah, meanwhile, plays Khalujaan with a permanently bewildered expression, like an aging golden retriever who has accidentally wandered into a high-stakes poker game and decided to just stay for the snacks. Their scenes together have an awkward, dusty chemistry that feels entirely earned by their combined decades in the trade, reminiscent of how Smita Patil and Naseer played off each other in Bazaar, where the romance is mostly communicated through long, exhausted sighs and the shared knowledge that everything is probably going to turn out terribly.

Huma Qureshi enters the picture as Muniya with a sharp, modern edge that cuts right through the antique gloom of the palace, though the film doesn't quite know what to do with her modernism once she's inside the gates. She gets the best physical business, tossing off casual threats while cleaning her fingernails with a small silver hairpin, but the script keeps forcing her into these bizarrely melodramatic corners that require her to look terrified of men she spent the previous scene outsmarting. It’s an uneven performance, swinging wildly from a cool, detached irony to wide-eyed panic without any middle gear, but she holds the screen against Dixit’s heavy royalty simply by moving faster and talking louder. Vijay Raaz pops up as a villain with a fondness for tigers and bad poetry, delivering his lines with a raspy growl that sounds like he’s gargling gravel between takes, and while he’s fun to watch, his character exists mostly to give the second half something resembling an antagonist.

The cinematography by Setu is all amber tones and deep shadows that swallow up the edges of every room, making even the daylight scenes look like they are happening behind a thick veil of expensive mosquito netting. Every surface looks damp or peeling, from the peeling plaster in the courtyard to the damp velvet of the upholstery, giving the whole production a tactile weight that most modern Bollywood movies avoid in favor of bright, flat digital sheen. Vishal Bhardwaj’s music score weaves sitar strains and heavy percussive beats under dialogue scenes without letting the melodies take over, though I could have done without the third time a certain melancholic flute motif swells up right as a character looks out a window at the rain. It’s an atmospheric heavy film, one that relies entirely on the viewer’s willingness to forgive long stretches of narrative stagnation for the sake of watching two aging grifters try to impress a woman who probably has three different poisons hidden in her handbag.

Underneath the caper plot and the literary affectations, the film is really about the terror of obsolescence, the way people who belong to an older, slower world try to survive in a present that regards them as little more than tourist attractions or historical curiosities. These characters are all performing versions of themselves that stopped being true thirty years ago, and the comedy comes from the friction between their grand theatrical posturing and the grubby, transactional reality of their daily lives. Nobody here is noble, and even the love stories are transactional at best, born out of mutual desperation and a shared inability to figure out how to pay the electricity bill on a thirty-room mansion that requires twenty servants just to keep the dust off the Persian rugs.

Yet there are moments when the tone curdles into something genuinely unpleasant, particularly during the subplot involving a local politician whose thugs are so cartoonishly vile that they belong in a completely different, much stupider movie. Hindi films have always struggled to balance broad farce with genuine grit, and Chaubey trips over that exact same hurdle here, sliding from a witty verbal duel about Sufi poetry straight into a clumsy kidnapping sequence that feels like it was shot on a different day by someone who had never met the main cast. It’s a messy piece of work, self-indulgent in the way only vanity projects backed by clever writers can be, and it asks you to sit through a lot of dead air waiting for the next good line to drop.

If I'm honest, the whole thing goes on for at least twenty minutes too long, dragging its heels through a climax that resolves almost nothing of narrative importance while giving every supporting actor one last chance to recite a couplet about betrayal. It doesn't add up to much, and when the credits finally roll over a jaunty remix of an old ghazal, you feel less like you've experienced a complete story and more like you've spent three hours listening to two very old men argue about politics in a railway waiting room while someone plays a harmonium in the corner.