Rajkummar Rao runs in this movie more than any working actor has any business running in a 106-minute political satire, and there is a specific, stiff-armed, high-elbowed form to it that tells you everything about the character before he ever opens his mouth to quote the constitution at a bunch of bewildered forest guards. Newton Kumar is not built for the jungle, which is the entire joke and also the entire tragedy, because the jungle in Amit Masurkar's second feature doesn't care about the Indian penal code or the Representation of the People Act or the ink on the thumb of the single voter who might or might not show up to cast a ballot in a Maoist-controlled pocket of Chhattisgarh. If I'm honest, the film gets a little too pleased with its own irony during the middle stretch where the bureaucratic absurdity threatens to curdle into a sketch comedy routine, but it pulls back right before it goes completely soft, landing somewhere between the dry, deadpan fatalism of a Czech New Wave tragedy and the kind of sharp, localized observational comedy that usually gets flattened out of modern Bollywood movies before they ever reach the editing bay. Rao plays Newton as a man whose integrity is not some noble armor but a brittle, jagged little cage he’s locked himself inside, refusing to let anyone slide him a file or offer him a cup of cheap tea if it violates some obscure protocol he dug out of a government pamphlet. He’s annoying, frankly. You wouldn't want to share a train compartment with him for twenty minutes, let alone spend an election day sweating through your uniform while armed insurgents watch you from the ridge with binoculars. Pankaj Tripathi, playing the weary paramilitary officer Aatma Singh who has seen three elections come and go and knows exactly where the bodies are buried both literally and metaphorically, matches Rao's tightly wound righteousness with a slouching, cigarette-smoking indifference that feels lived-in down to the dust on his epaulets. They spend the whole runtime circling each other like two stray dogs who know they're trapped in the same sack, and their verbal sparring has a crackle to it that reminds you why we still bother watching Hindi films in theaters when streaming has mostly turned the medium into wallpaper. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how the sound design occasionally drops in these heavy, portentous ambient synth drones whenever the narrative tries to lean into the political gravity of the situation, because Masurkar’s direction is at its best when it trusts the absolute silence of the trees and the sound of dry leaves crunching under combat boots. Anjali Patil plays Malko, a local tribal schoolteacher who serves as the polling booth's designated local official, and she doesn't get nearly enough lines, but every time the camera catches her face while Newton is lecturing a terrified villager about democratic rights, her expression does this complicated dance of exhaustion and mild contempt that grounds the whole exercise in actual human geography rather than urban satire. The cinematography by Swapnil S. Sonawane treats the red dirt and the oppressive green canopy not as exotic backdrop tourism but as a literal prison, shooting the characters from low angles that make the endless sky look flat and indifferent. There's a cousin-film energy here to Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s older political dramas, though without the ideological fury, trading that out for a much more contemporary kind of bureaucratic exhaustion where nobody even believes the system works anymore, but they keep filling out the triplicate forms anyway because the alternative is getting court-martialed or losing your pension. Masurkar has a very specific rhythm that lets scenes play out until the awkwardness hangs in the air like humidity, refusing to cut away to a reaction shot or a musical cue that might tell the audience how to feel, which makes the few moments of sudden, shocking violence land with a dull thud rather than a cinematic boom. The screenplay, co-written by Mayank Tewari and Varun Grover, is smart enough to avoid turning the tribal villagers into either noble savages or helpless victims, giving them a weary pragmatism that makes Newton’s evangelical zeal look almost obscene by the time afternoon rolls around and not a single soul has walked down the path to the ballot box. You watch this and you think about how rare it is for Hindi movies to look at the machinery of the state with anything other than worship or cartoonish corruption, preferring here to look at the mid-level friction where ideology meets a broken stylus and a bottle of indelible ink that won't dry in the damp heat.

There's a scene near the middle where Newton tries to explain the secret ballot to an old man who has no idea what an election is, and the sheer disconnect between Delhi's grand parliamentary fantasies and the muddy reality of a district where the police and the rebels take turns burning down the schoolhouse gets laid bare without the filmmakers needing to underline it with a big speech. Rao's posture in this sequence is magnificent; his spine is so straight it looks painful, every muscle clenched against the absurdity of his own assignment, yet his voice maintains this irritating, bureaucratic steady-state that drives Aatma Singh nearly to the point of drawing his sidearm. It recalls the bureaucratic deadpan of Jirí Menzel's Closely Watched Trains, though translated into the sweltering, administrative nightmare of central India where every government scheme feels like a joke played by someone living in an air-conditioned room four thousand miles away. Tripathi doesn't have to raise his voice to dominate his scenes; he just leans against a jeep, exhales smoke into the afternoon haze, and drops lines like casual hand grenades that expose the utter pointlessness of Newton's mission. The film refuses to provide a neat moral epiphany for either man, which is why it stays with you long after the credits have rolled on a flat, unceremonious note that feels entirely earned by the two hours of stubborn inertia that preceded it. That unceremonious ending is perhaps the sharpest choice the production makes, turning what could have been a standard message-movie climax into a shrug of an acknowledgment that the gears of the nation will keep grinding away regardless of whether one honest clerk loses his mind in the forest or not.