The dubbing on Aryan Vaid’s first major courtroom scene is so far out of sync with his actual jaw movements that you spend the first five minutes wondering if you need to adjust your speakers, which is probably not the reaction director Jayprakash a.k.a. Jay Prakash was going for when he set up the central moral rot of Market.

Bollywood movies from the mid-two-thousands had this strange habit of looking like they were shot through a vaseline-smeared lens while simultaneously being lit by twelve different tube lights from the ceiling, giving every frame an unflattering, greasy fluorescence that makes even the air-conditioned interiors look sticky. The screenplay wanders around the underbelly of Mumbai flesh trade without ever quite deciding whether it wants to be an investigative exposé or just an excuse to put Suman Ranganathan in slow-motion walking sequences against red velvet drapes. It is a messy production, lurching between grimy street corners and inexplicably expensive-looking high-rise apartments where nobody ever seems to work a real job except for shouting into landline phones.

Manisha Koirala walks through this entire debris field with a tired, heavy-lidded authority that makes you wonder what kind of hypnotic contract the producers must have signed to get her to anchor a B-grade exploitation flick with such unbothered dignity. She plays a woman who runs her own show in a man's world, a tired trope that gets recycled in Hindi films about every four days, but she refuses to play it with the usual theatrical fist-shaking or tearful monologues. Instead, she just stands in the corner of dimly lit rooms, smoking slim cigarettes and letting other people make fools of themselves before she offers a flat, two-word correction that changes the entire power dynamic of the scene.

That kind of quiet gravity usually belongs in something like Chandni Bar, but Market insists on dragging everything down into cheap melodrama and dialogue that sounds like it was translated from an outdated paperback thriller found in a railway station kiosk. Shweta Menon pops up in the periphery with a fierce, coiled energy that deserved an entirely different movie, chewing through her lines as if she knows the editor is going to hack out half her reaction shots to make room for another lingering pan across a cabaret floor. The soundtrack relies on the same three synthesized tabla beats looping over and over whenever tension is supposed to be rising, and honestly, if I hear that specific high-pitched flute trill one more time, I might actually lose my mind.

The themes are heavy-handed to the point of absurdity, poking at exploitation, systemic corruption, and the transactional nature of human affection without ever finding a fresh angle or a genuinely uncomfortable question to ask the audience. Everyone is compromised, everyone is shouting by the second half, and yet the dramatic stakes never quite rise above the level of a mid-afternoon soap opera broadcast on a cable channel with bad signal strength. Jay Prakash directs with the enthusiasm of a man rushing to finish a shift so he can catch the last local train home, letting scenes drag on five seconds too long before cutting abruptly to a wide shot of Marine Drive at dusk.

You stick with it for Koirala, because she has this rare gift for making garbage dialogue sound like reluctant poetry, even when she is wearing a sequined tunic that looks like it cost two hundred rupees at a Crawford Market stall. There is no grand artistic vision here, nor any hidden brilliance waiting to be unlocked by future generations of cinephiles who love excavating forgotten trash from the digital bins of streaming platforms. It just sits there on the screen, awkward and uneven and occasionally mildly hypnotic whenever the camera catches Koirala staring blankly into the middle distance while someone else is screaming about money.