Ashmit Patel has this way of blinking right before a line delivery that makes you wonder if he forgot what language the scene was written in. Nirdosh opens with him standing in a police station wearing a leather jacket that looks heavy enough to stunt his growth, staring at a corkboard covered in Polaroids with red yarn crisscrossing between them like someone tried to crochet a murder. If I'm honest, the whole thing feels like it was shot on a Tuesday afternoon when nobody was particularly invested in getting home early. Bollywood has a long, slightly embarrassing history of borrowing structural scaffolding from cheap American direct-to-video thrillers from the nineties, but usually there is some sort of frantic energy keeping the lights on. Here, the energy is closer to an insurance seminar held in a hotel basement just outside the airport. Manjari Fadnnis enters about ten minutes later with a furrowed brow that never quite relaxes, carrying a file folder she looks at constantly without ever turning a single page.

Pradeep Rangwani and Subhash Sehgal split the directing duties, or at least they both have their names on the poster, which often means one person shot the dialogue while the other yelled at the lighting guy until he moved a C-stand. The screenplay operates on a logic where nobody asks a follow-up question if the person lying to them speaks with enough misplaced confidence. A murder happens in a locked apartment, or at least an apartment where the door was closed until someone kicked it open, and the local police force treats the crime scene like a public transit waiting area. People wander in and out of frames holding cups of lukewarm chai while important forensic evidence sits on a coffee table next to a copy of a glossy magazine featuring a starlet who retired from acting twenty years ago. The editing rhythm changes every ten minutes, lurching from leisurely pans across dusty Venetian blinds to frantic cross-cutting that implies a race against time even when the characters are literally just sitting in a sedan waiting for a traffic light to turn green.

Manisha Kelkar plays a supporting role as a lawyer who seems to have graduated from an institution where the primary curriculum involved leaning against doorframes and speaking in husky whispers. When she interrogates Ashmit Patel about his whereabouts on the night of the incident, the two of them stare past each other’s ears with the strained concentration of people playing a high-stakes game of telephone in an empty gymnasium. Manjari Fadnnis tries to hold the dramatic center together through sheer force of frowning, but the material keeps sliding away from her like a wet bar of hotel soap. It reminds me a bit of Gupt where the twists arrived with such ridiculous frequency that you stopped caring who swung the knife, except without the benefit of Bobby Deol running through burning buildings in a chunky knit sweater. Ashmit Patel uses about two facial expressions for the entire running time, alternating between a mildly concerned squint and a broad, teeth-baring grin that appears whenever his character is supposed to be projecting innocence to a skeptical inspector who clearly wants to go out for lunch.

The cinematography relies heavily on a blue filter that makes everyone look like they have mild circulatory issues, casting long shadows across bare walls that probably belong to a rented bungalow in Madh Island. Every time a flashback occurs, the frame softens around the edges with digital gauze that looks smeared on with a greasy thumb. Then there is the soundtrack, which consists of three distinct synthesizer chords that drop every time someone opens a desk drawer or looks out a window at the rain. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me how the exact same three-second sting plays every single time a character has a realization, even if that realization is just remembering where they left their car keys. Hindi films have occasionally mastered the art of low-budget suspense when the filmmakers lean into the constraints, but Nirdosh tries to mimic the visual gloss of a much more expensive production without the grip equipment or the color grading budget to pull it off.

Beneath the surface of all these poorly lit interrogation rooms and confusing timelines, the movie wants to say something about modern urban paranoia and the erosion of trust between people who share a zip code. Characters constantly accuse each other of leading double lives, slipping into secret parking garages at midnight, and making mysterious phone calls to burner numbers that always seem to start with the exact same prefix. Yet the themes dissolve the moment someone has to deliver a plot-heavy exposition monologue while standing in front of a fake bookshelf made of hollow plywood. You can sense the gears turning behind the actors' eyes as they try to remember whether they are supposed to be hiding a dark secret or just paying off their mortgage.

By the time the actual culprit is revealed in a crowded warehouse that has three different kinds of lighting fixtures clashing in the background, the emotional investment has long since leaked out of the room like air from a punctured pool float. Hindi movies live or die on the strength of their convictions, and this one feels like it was assembled by committee during a series of long, uncomfortable conference calls where nobody wanted to make a definitive creative choice. The final shot lingers on Ashmit Patel’s face as he looks out into a gray Mumbai drizzle, the camera holding on his neutral expression for four beats too long before the hard black cut to the credits, leaving you with nothing to chew on except the lingering memory of that terrible leather jacket.