There is a specific kind of sound a CGI alien makes when it hits a patch of dry Maharashtrian dirt, and if I'm honest, I have heard it way too many times in my life. Shirish Kunder directs Joker as if he is trying to see how much visual noise a single cinematic frame can hold without completely shattering into digital dust. You sit there in the dark waiting for the narrative to settle down into something recognizable, but it just keeps adding layers of absurdity until the screen looks less like a motion picture and more like a badly rendered screensaver from the late nineties. The whole enterprise lurches forward on fumes and good intentions, stumbling through narrative cul-de-sacs that nobody bothered to map out beforehand, leaving the audience stranded in a sort of cinematic no-man's-land where nothing actually hurts and nothing truly registers.

Akshay Kumar plays a NASA scientist named Agastya who gets sucked back into his forgotten rural roots, and he has this glazed, exhausted expression throughout that suggests he read the entire bound script in a single panic attack while sitting in a traffic jam on the Western Express Highway. He isn't terrible, mind you, but he operates on a completely different frequency from the absolute chaos happening around him. He plays it straight, deadpan, and bafflingly serious, while the villagers behind him are dressed like extras from a low-budget sci-fi parody that got lost on its way to a fancy-dress competition. It reminds me a bit of Nicolas Cage in The Wicker Man, though lacking that specific, beautiful brand of unhinged sincerity that makes accidental comedy watchable on a loop. Sonakshi Sinha gets very little to do besides look mildly concerned near tractors and doorways, occasionally dropping a line of dialogue that sounds like it was looped three days after the shoot in a windowless studio in Bandra with a broken air conditioner. The supporting cast—Avtar Gill, Bikramjeet Kanwarpal, Anjan Srivastava—pop up in various states of bewilderment, reading lines that bounce off the actors like rubber pellets.

The visual design leans heavily on colors so saturated they practically bleed out of the liquid crystal display and stain your sneakers. Every field is aggressively green, every sky is piercingly blue, and the fake spacecraft sitting in the middle of a dusty village square looks like a giant plastic leftover from a festival float that someone forgot to pack away. G.V. Prakash Kumar's music drops in with these massive, brassy orchestrations that try to convince you something momentous is happening while two people are simply standing by a well talking about irrigation taxes. It's a small thing, but it bugged me: a recurring audio cue of a theremin-like electronic whine that accompanies every single reveal of the extraterrestrial visitors, playing at least four times too many during the middle stretch until your teeth begin to ache.

Bollywood movies have a long and storied history of embracing high-concept nonsense and turning it into box office magic through sheer star power and infectious rhythm, but this particular experiment misses the mark by a wide margin because it forgets to anchor its absurdity in any sort of emotional reality. When the plot finally pivots toward a bizarre social commentary about government neglect and media sensationalism, the tone shifts so violently that you get whiplash. The inhabitants of the fictional village of Paglapur pretend to be mentally unstable to draw attention to their plight, a premise that sits uncomfortably on the screen and feels remarkably thin even by the loose standards of commercial hindi films. The screenplay lurches from broad slapstick to sentimental speechifying without ever earning the transition, leaving the actors stranded in scenes that require them to weep one minute and dodge CGI lasers the next.

There is an exhausting literal-mindedness to the way the comedy is executed. Every gag is telegraphed three minutes before it lands, and then underlined twice for anyone who might have nodded off during the setup. Minissha Lamba and Chitrangada Singh make brief appearances that feel contractual rather than narrative, dropping in to shake up the frame before disappearing back into the digital fog. The camera work by Sudeep Chatterjee captures the vast, dusty expanses with a certain crispness, but it's an odd mismatch—why spend money on gorgeous anamorphic lenses and precise lighting setups when the subject matter is essentially a live-action cartoon about green men in rubber suits? Hindi cinema has occasionally ventured into outer space with varying degrees of charm, but rarely has an interstellar premise felt so thoroughly trapped inside a small, stifling box of studio sets and green screens.

The closing stretch of the film abandons all pretense of narrative logic and turns into a frantic parade of digital effects that blur together into an indistinct grey-and-green smudge. Characters run across fields, spaceships hover awkwardly above thatched roofs, and the background score hits the crescendo button and holds it down with a heavy brick. You leave the theater with a dull throb behind your eyes and a lingering sense of profound confusion about how any of this made it past the initial pitch meeting, let alone onto thousands of screens worldwide.