That prosthetic nose sits just a fraction of an inch too high on Amitabh Bachchan’s face. You catch it in profile shots where the afternoon sun hits the crumbling plaster of Fatima Mahal, that stubborn crease refusing to move when Mirza scowls at a tenant who is three months late on a hundred-rupee rent payment. It is a small thing, but it bugged me for the first twenty minutes. Then the film settles into its dirty, humid rhythm, and you stop looking at the latex and start listening to the wheeze in Bachchan’s throat, that old-man rasp of a miser who would rather chew glass than spend an extra rupee on decent cooking oil.

Director Shoojit Sircar and writer Juhi Chaturvedi have made a movie about people who are entirely unpleasant to be around for more than ten minutes at a time. This is a relief. Too many modern Hindi movies feel the need to sand down the edges of their protagonists so they can be adopted as national treasures by the weekend box office. Here, nobody is virtuous. Mirza is a skinflint waiting for his octogenarian wife to die so he can finally inherit the dilapidated Lucknow mansion she legally owns, and Baankey, played with twitchy, rat-like desperation by Ayushmann Khurrana, is a flour-mill tenant who treats his mother and four sisters like obstacles on his personal path to grievance. They hate each other with a petty, consuming passion that feels less like cinematic conflict and more like a municipal drain that has been clogged with plastic bags for thirty years. The screenplay does not offer a single grand speech about class struggle or the loss of heritage, preferring instead to watch these two cheapskates bicker over the ownership of lightbulbs and ancient water pumps.

Bachchan leans into the indignity of old age without any of the self-conscious nobility that usually plagues late-career legends. His Mirza walks with a stiff, arthritic shuffle, bent at the waist like a question mark, clutching a worn cloth bag that seems to contain his entire earthly dignity and two stale rusks. It reminds me a bit of Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt, though without the comforting voiceover or the midwestern vistas, traded here for pigeon droppings and grease-stained walls. Khurrana matches him by dropping his usual earnest leading-man charm entirely, giving us a greasy-haired pest who is always chewing on something cheap and looking like he’s about to bolt through a doorway if anyone asks him for real money. Their confrontations have the rhythm of stray dogs fighting over a rib bone, neither man possessing enough moral high ground to look down on the other, both stuck in a decaying architectural mausoleum that neither of them can afford to maintain or leave.

Vijay Raaz wanders through this mess as an archaeologist from the ASI who treats the crumbling mansion with the kind of exhausted bureaucratic boredom usually reserved for inspecting potholes. He doesn't get many lines, but he wears a khaki safari suit that looks like it hasn't seen a washing machine since the early nineties, and every time he sighs you feel the weight of four decades of municipal file-pushing. The supporting women, particularly Farrukh Jaffar as the ancient Begum who refuses to die and Srishti Shrivastava as Baankey’s sharp-tongued sister Guddo, run circles around the men whenever they share a frame. Jaffar’s delivery is so casual and dry that you half suspect she was just mumbling complaints between takes and Sircar kept the cameras rolling. Abhijit Dasgupta’s cinematography doesn't romanticize the decay with golden-hour filters, choosing instead a bleached, dust-choked palette that makes you want to reach for a glass of water.

There is an entire subgenre of contemporary Indian cinema that thinks social realism requires a string quartet to weep softly whenever a poor person looks at a brick wall. Gulabo Sitabo ditches that entirely. Shantanu Moitra’s score is sparse, mostly consisting of reedy accordion notes and percussion that sounds like someone tapping their fingernails against a tin mug. It stays out of the way. Sometimes it stops completely for five minutes during a scene where nothing happens except Mirza trying to unscrew a brass doorknob from a door that belongs to someone else. The editing by Chandrashekhar Prajapati does linger on reaction shots just a fraction too long during the middle stretch, especially when the local politicians and corrupt cops enter the fray, turning a tight two-person feud into a slightly bloated real-estate farce that loses its focus.

The film’s central metaphor is heavy-handed if you pause to look at it—the old house as a dying culture, the tenants and landlords as parasites eating the corpse—but Chaturvedi’s dialogue is too sharp to let you dwell on the symbolism for long. People talk about potatoes and water bills and old debts with a specificity that grounds the poetry. It’s an anti-romance of Lucknow, stripping away the poetry of tehzeeb and nawabi nostalgia to reveal a city of damp masonry, greedy relatives, and endless court cases that outlive the people who filed them. When the climax finally arrives, it doesn't offer a moral resolution or a heartwarming reconciliation between classes. Nobody learns a lesson about the value of family or the transient nature of wealth. The house simply changes hands through a legal loophole that leaves both Mirza and Baankey right back where they started, grumbling under a hot Uttar Pradesh sun while someone else counts the copper coins.