There is a specific kind of background hiss on the dialogue tracks in the first twenty minutes of Neeraj Ghaywan's feature debut that suggests someone cut corners on the mix in a hurry, and if I'm honest, it bugged me every time the audio dropped back down into silence. You hear it near the ghats, under the murmur of priests and the rumble of diesel engines churning through brown water. It's a small mechanical roughness in a picture that otherwise feels scrubbed until the grain practically squeaks, floating somewhere between the holy muck of the Ganges and the neon-lit coaching centers where teenagers memorize calculus equations they will forget the second they walk out the glass doors. Varanasi is not usually filmed this way in contemporary Indian cinema, avoiding the golden-hour tourist trap aesthetic entirely while still refusing to lean into pure squalor just to impress festival programmers who want their poverty raw and unfiltered.

Devi’s story starts in a hotel room with police boots crashing through a flimsy door, a setup that could easily curdle into moralistic melodrama or cheap exploitation if the writing didn't immediately pivot toward the quiet, suffocating humiliation that follows. Richa Chadda plays this fallout with a stiffness in her shoulders that never quite relaxes, not even when she is typing away in the air-conditioned drone of a computer lab trying to outrun her father’s impending social death. She isn't playing a symbol of female empowerment or a tragic victim of patriarchal violence; she is just someone who made a mistake in a rented room and now has to pay extortion money to a cop whose mustache smells cheap. Opposite her, Sanjay Mishra carries the heavy, rounded posture of a man who spends his days burning bodies and his evenings arguing with himself over whether to buy a flat outside the city limits. Mishra doesn't give you the standard weeping patriarch routine. He stares into his tea, mutters about property values, and looks like he hasn't slept a full night since his wife died.

Then there is Deepak, played by Vicky Kaushal with a kind of raw, gangly hunger that makes you wonder how long the actor spent hanging around actual railway tracks waiting for scrap metal to clear. Kaushal brings an unpredictable physical energy to scenes that might otherwise drag, sprinting up the sandy banks or laughing too loud at cheap jokes with his friends who talk constantly about girls they will never touch. When he falls for Shweta Tripathi’s character, the romance doesn't feel manufactured for the trailer. It unfolds in stolen text messages and dusty scooter rides past brick kilns where the air tastes like ash and sulfur, capturing that specific, dizzying rush of college-town longing that feels like the entire universe until the world abruptly steps in with its caste hierarchies and ruins the math.

The screenplay, written by Varun Grover, weaves these two tracks together through the physical geography of the riverbanks where cremations run on a strict commercial schedule, though it sometimes relies a bit too heavily on coincidence to keep the narrative threads from tangling. You notice the seams when the dialogue turns slightly too literary for characters who are supposed to be ordinary kids scraping by in Uttar Pradesh, a habit that occasionally sneaks into Bollywood movies when the writers come from a poetry background and want to make sure the audience catches the metaphor. But Grover mostly keeps the language grounded in local slang and transactional cruelty, especially in the scenes where police officers shake down college students or railway workers argue over the price of wood.

Cinematographer Avinash Arun shoots the city without the usual spiritual fog, preferring hard afternoon glare that makes everyone squint and sweat through their shirts. The light hits the water not with cinematic grace but with a dull, flat glare that feels exhausting to look at, matching the emotional temperature of characters who are too tired to cry. When the soundtrack kicks in—composed by Indian Ocean with lyrics that sometimes lean too hard into the poetry—it occasionally pushes the scenes toward a manufactured emotion they were already handling quite well on their own without the swelling guitars. It's an unnecessary crutch in a film that works best when it is just observing the small, boring indignities of trying to survive in a place where the dead generate more steady income than the living.

There is a striking lack of clean resolution to any of the subplots, which separates this from the usual narrative arc you find in standard Hindi movies where every stray emotional thread must be neatly tied in a bow before the credits roll. People keep living their lives, trains keep arriving late, and the fires by the river keep burning whether you are mourning or moving on to another town.

Kaushal’s performance here does a lot of heavy lifting for the second half, reminding you of how rare it is to see a young lead in Hindi films who can look genuinely unpolished on camera without trying to be charmingly awkward. He lacks the practiced gloss of a star kid launched by a major studio, moving with an angular discomfort that recalls a young Irrfan Khan in the way he occupies space in a crowded frame without ever demanding that you look only at him. When he sits by the water at the end, staring out at the distance after a loss that hits with sudden, brutal economy, the film doesn't offer any comforting platitudes about how time heals all wounds or how the river washes everything clean. The water just flows past the burning pyres, carrying whatever is left behind out toward the horizon.