That heavy, synthetic screech of violins right before a close-up of a shattered wine glass isn't even the worst part of Hate Story 4. It is just the most persistent. Vishal Pandya directs like someone who once watched a 1990s erotic thriller on a bus with no subtitles and decided the pacing was the only thing standing between cinema and true greatness. We are talking about a movie that treats plot twists not as narrative revelations, but as sudden, loud noises meant to wake up everyone in the third row who nodded off during the exposition heavy-lifting. If I'm honest, the whole thing feels less like a structured narrative and more like a series of expensive music videos loosely glued together by people who really, really wanted to shoot scenes in London parks without paying for the proper permits.

The screenplay by Samiksha Shailesh is a mess of half-baked vendettas and corporate backstabbing that makes standard revenge dramas look like Shakespeare. Brothers Rajbir and Tasha, played with varying degrees of wooden stubbornness by Karan Wahi and Vivan Bhatena, fall for the same aspiring model named Tasha—wait, no, her name is Natasha, played by Urvashi Rautela. The confusion over names in the first twenty minutes is genuinely staggering. They compete for her affections, not out of any recognizable human passion, but because the script demands that every male character in the vicinity must immediately lose their minds upon entering her radius. Gulshan Grover pops up as their wealthy father who mostly sits behind large mahogany desks and looks disappointed in everybody, which honestly feels like the most relatable acting choice in the entire runtime. The dialogue sounds like it was translated from a completely different language, run through an outdated internet filter, and then handed to actors who were told to just look intense while holding expensive cocktails.

Urvashi Rautela is cast here as the central figure of obsession, and she spends ninety percent of her screen time staring into middle distance with a glossy, unblinking intensity that suggests she is calculating the square root of something very difficult. Her performance has zero modulation. Whether she is weeping over a betrayal or executing a multi-layered revenge plot involving offshore bank accounts and staged car accidents, her face maintains the exact same pristine, laminated sheen. It is a striking visual choice, though perhaps not an effective dramatic one. She makes Deepika Padukone in Race 2 look like Meryl Streep by comparison, moving through frame after frame like a high-end department store mannequin that has somehow learned to deliver threats in a low, breathy whisper. When she tries to look furious, her eyebrows barely twitch. It's a small thing but it bugged me every single time the camera pushed in for an emotional reaction.

The technical departments are operating on a sugar rush of neon grading and arbitrary camera movements that seem designed solely to induce mild vertigo. Cinematographer Manoj Soni shoots London through a vaseline-smeared lens that attempts to pass off grey overcast skies as high-fashion moody lighting, complete with slow-motion pans around fountains that have no narrative purpose whatsoever. The soundtrack is a cacophony of remixed club tracks and sluggish romantic ballads that drop into scenes with zero audio transition, cutting off mid-chorus whenever a character needs to deliver a clumsy exposition dump about insider trading. Sound design is aggressively literal. Every time someone pours a drink, the foley artist turns the volume up so high it sounds like Niagara Falls hitting a crystal tumbler. And let us not talk about the supporting cast of corporate goons who all wear identical black suits and speak in dubbed voices that frequently fall half a second out of sync with their lips.

Hindi cinema has a long and occasionally glorious history with the pulpy thriller, ranging from the genuinely sleazy exploitation flicks of the eighties to more polished neo-noir experiments that actually bothered to invent a functioning antagonist. Hate Story 4 belongs strictly to the bottom half of that barrel, ignoring character motivation in favor of another costume change in a penthouse apartment that looks like a furniture showroom. The thematic ambitions of the picture, which occasionally gesture vaguely toward female empowerment and the crushing weight of male entitlement, dissolve into puddles of soapy melodrama the second a choreographed dance number breaks out in a damp alleyway. When our protagonist finally delivers her grand monologue about why she is ruining these men, she does it while wearing a red gown that costs more than the catering budget for the supporting crew. It is hard to take a speech about deep-seated psychological trauma seriously when the wind machine is working overtime to blow hair across the actor's face in three-quarter profile.

The editing rhythm is completely deranged, jumping from tight close-ups of a ticking watch to wide aerial shots of Tower Bridge with no regard for spatial continuity or basic narrative geography. Characters teleport from subterranean parking garages to luxury hotel suites in the span of a single cut, leaving behind any semblance of real-world logic. Daniel Eghan shows up as some shadowy British businessman who needs to sign a contract, and his line deliveries are so flat they practically absorb surrounding light. He exists purely to give the brothers something else to argue about over lukewarm coffee in an empty boardroom. By the time the third act rolls around and the double-crosses start multiplying like bad math, you stop caring who is tricking whom. You just want the characters to sit down, take off the heavy winter coats they are wearing indoors, and stop glaring at each other across swimming pools. There is no joy in the sleaze here, only a crushing exhaustion that seeps out of the screen every time the director remembers he needs to include another slow-motion tracking shot of someone walking away from an explosion that nobody bothered to CGI properly.