There is a specific kind of breathless, over-caffeinated editing in contemporary Hindi cinema where the director seems terrified you might blink, cutting from a medium shot to a tighter medium shot just because the actor shifted their weight, and it makes watching things like Khuda Haafiz Chapter 2: Agni Pariksha feel less like experiencing a narrative and more like dodging shrapnel in a wind tunnel. Let's be honest, Faruk Kabir’s sequel to his own 2020 surprise hit doesn't really want to be watched so much as it wants to be endured as a test of your emotional stamina, dragging its characters through a meat-grinder of trauma that makes the first film look practically pastoral by comparison. We pick up with Sameer and Nargis trying to adopt a child after surviving the harrowing ordeal of the original narrative, only for their newly found domestic peace to be shattered almost immediately because the universe in these movies is fundamentally malicious and allergic to joy. Vidyut Jammwal returns as the stoic, perpetually bruised husband who fights like a blender set to puree, while Shivaleeka Oberoi is tasked with weeping in various degrees of lighting while carrying the psychic weight of a society that refuses to let victimized women have anything resembling a normal life.

The script treats subtlety like a contagious disease, opting instead for sledgehammer symbolism and dialogue that sounds like it was translated from an already aggressive motivational poster. Kabir, who writes as well as directs, cannot let a single thematic beat resonate in the silence, so every time Sameer looks at a picture of his traumatized daughter, a booming chorus reminds us that he is a grieving father who will burn the world down, which is a lot of sonic heavy lifting for a guy whose primary emotional expression involves narrowing his eyes and breathing heavily through his nose. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how often the sound design drops in this echoing, metallic thud every time someone makes a fist, as if Jammwal's knuckles are constructed out of church bells. The supporting cast does what they can with the rubble they're given, particularly Dibyendu Bhattacharya, who brings a gravelly, weary authenticity to his role as a local cleric, even when the dialogue sounds less like human speech and more like an editorial board meeting on communal harmony. Watching Bhattacharya navigate these ridiculously over-written confrontations makes you wish he was the lead, because he manages to locate a dusty, lived-in reality that the glossier, gym-sculpted aesthetics of the film are constantly trying to flatten out. Unlike John Abraham in Force, who used sheer mammalian bulk to anchor his action scenes in a sort of stoic melancholy, Jammwal plays Sameer with an almost twitchy, exhausted desperation, running through alleys and leaping over market stalls like a man who just remembered he left the stove on while his house is actively collapsing.

Cinematographer Jitan Harmeet Singh bathes every single interior in this bruised, midnight-blue and amber wash that tries desperately to evoke David Fincher but usually just looks like a high-end car commercial shot during a power outage. The camera is never still, orbiting the actors during mundane conversations about school admissions as if an assassin might drop from the ceiling at any second, which robs the actual violence of its punctuation because the film has already hit maximum velocity before the opening credits even finish scrolling. Vishal Mishra’s soundtrack is full of these mournful, violin-heavy tracks that bleed into the action sequences, turning every bone-crunching kick to the ribs into a tragic opera about the failure of the Indian judicial system. That systemic failure is supposed to be the beating heart of the project, turning a standard-issue rescue mission into a broader social commentary on child abuse, but the movie is far too interested in the satisfying crunch of cartilage to actually engage with the legal or psychological complexities it keeps shouting about from the rooftops. Bollywood movies have always had a complicated relationship with vigilantism, treating the law as a useless impediment that only gets in the way of a proper fatherly beatdown, but here that trope feels less like classic masala catharsis and more like a grim, joyless trudge through a moral swamp.

There is an exhausting relentless to the second half where Sameer is thrown into a notoriously brutal prison, and if you have seen any prison film made in the last forty years, you can check off every single cliché on your bingo card within ten minutes. Inmates sneering in the shadows. Corrupt guards taking bribes. A solitary confinement cell that looks like an interior designer's interpretation of a nervous breakdown. Jammwal gets to do some genuinely impressive choreography, utilizing the cramped concrete corridors with a fluid, bone-breaking efficiency that reminds you why he remains one of our most physically gifted action stars, even if the editing chops up his martial arts into such tiny fragments that you can rarely appreciate the geography of a fight. The sound design here goes completely off the rails, layering wet squffiches and metallic ringing over every punch until you feel like you are being beaten about the head and ears with a bag of wet laundry. Oberoi, meanwhile, is stuck on the outside dealing with the local louts who view her survival as an affront to their delicate patriarchal sensibilities, and her scenes have this hollow, stagey quality where every reaction shot feels held two seconds too long, as if the director is begging the audience to feel sorry for her.

We are told that this is a story about resilience, but it feels much more like an endurance test engineered by people who confuse volume with impact. When the credits finally roll, you aren't left with a profound sense of catharsis or a lingering thought about the state of justice in contemporary India; you just feel a dull ringing in your ears and a profound appreciation for silence. The film wants to be a roaring fire of vengeance, but it ends up feeling like a smoky room where someone is burning old tires, making your eyes water and your throat tickle long after you have managed to find the remote control and turn the whole noisy thing off.