The sound design on the opening title cards of Cuttputlli is aggressively loud, the sort of heavy bass thump that rattles theater cup holders and feels entirely detached from whatever mood the director is actually trying to establish on screen. Let's talk about the film, or at least try to, because Bollywood movies have developed this exhausting habit of wrapping every standard procedural in a layer of generic dread that sounds like a Hans Zimmer outtake played through a blown speaker cabinet. Akshay Kumar plays a film graduate turned aspiring thriller writer who fails to find a producer, pivots to the police force because of a dead brother-in-law, and immediately finds himself thrust into a sleepy hill station community terrorized by a predatory creep leaving dead schoolgirls in public squares. If I'm honest, the premise is already doing heavy lifting borrowed from the phenomenal Malayalam film Ratsasan, which means half the suspense is baked in before anyone even steps in front of the lens. You watch the setup and you wait for the beats you already know.

Director Ranjit M. Tewari shoots these gruesome discoveries with a weirdly flat television aesthetic, alternating between drone shots of misty pine forests and claustrophobic police station interiors that look like they were lit by someone who just discovered three-point lighting on a YouTube tutorial. The screenplay by Pooja Ladha Surti does a decent enough job streamlining the original Tamil narrative to fit a Hindi-speaking demographic, but it loses a lot of the sweaty, claustrophobic panic that made the source material so effective. Instead of leaning into the procedural grind, the camera keeps drifting toward Akshay Kumar's face, searching for expressions of intense, constipated concentration that pass for deep thought in commercial cinema these days. The pacing stutters every time a song sequence threatens to break out, though thankfully these are mercifully brief compared to the bloated musical interruptions standard in most Hindi films.

Akshay Kumar is just there, walking through his scenes with the weary professionalism of a contractor who knows his measurements and wants to finish the drywall before lunch, offering no real variation in tone whether he's interviewing a grieving mother or staring at a whiteboard covered in red yarn. He has this one specific squint he deploys whenever his character is supposed to be having an intellectual breakthrough, and by the third time he does it, you start looking at the background extras to see if anyone else is actually acting. Rakul Preet Singh fares slightly better despite being given precious little to do other than look concerned, serve as a sounding board for exposition dumps, and occasionally wear very expensive winter coats in a small town where everyone else is freezing in sweaters. Chandrachur Singh pops up as a weary senior officer with a mustache and a perpetual sigh, lending the proceedings a faint whiff of authenticity that the rest of the cast struggles to maintain.

Then there is Sujith Shankar, who plays the primary suspect with a terrifying, wet-eyed intensity that completely knocks the rest of the movie off balance the moment he arrives on screen. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how the sound editors decided to dub his breathing so loud in the interrogation scenes that it sounds like a vacuum cleaner hooked up to a microphone, distracting from what is genuinely good physical work. The cinematography by Rajeev Ravi tries to paint Kasauli as a picturesque trap of fog and sharp shadows, but the digital color grading is so aggressively teal-and-orange that you could practically guess the LUT settings by squinting. When the soundtrack isn't blaring those obnoxious thriller stings, it relies on acoustic guitar strumming that sounds like background music for a mid-tier real estate commercial.

The film wants to talk about the rot beneath the surface of idyllic mountain towns and the way institutional failure lets predators slip through bureaucratic cracks, but it never commits to the politics of its own premise. It prefers to treat the horrific murders of teenage girls as a puzzle for a clever man to solve, focusing on the geometry of clues rather than the messy, devastating reality of community grief. Characters talk about psychological profiling as if it's a magic trick, reducing complex criminal behavior to a series of neat bullet points that fit nicely into a police file before the interval hits. You never feel the dust of the archive or the stale air of the interrogation room because everything is scrubbed clean for maximum mainstream comfort. Even the villain's manifesto gets reduced to a neat psychological disorder explained away in two minutes of hurried dialogue, robbing the narrative of any lingering discomfort.

Cuttputlli is a competent, utterly forgettable time-waster that proves how difficult it is to remake a tight, psychological cat-and-mouse game without losing its edge in translation to the commercial Hindi film industry. It lacks the sheer grit of the original, trading uncomfortable truths for star-driven heroics and predictable twists that you can spot from the halfway mark. There is an audience for this kind of slick, sanitized comfort-thriller, and if you have not seen the version that inspired it, you might even find yourself leaning forward during the third-act confrontation. But as the credits roll and another generic pop track kicks in to scrub the memory of the past two hours clean, you are left wondering why everyone involved bothered to make something so thoroughly middle-of-the-road when the blueprint for greatness was sitting right there.