Biranchi Das has this terrible habit of chewing on his lower lip whenever he thinks the state apparatus is about to crush him, which is often, because he is running a makeshift boxing camp for impoverished toddlers in the slums of Bhubaneswar out of his own pocket with no official backing whatsoever. You see it in the way he corners local bureaucrats, half-shouting and half-pleading while his palm nervously sweeps back his thinning hair, sweaty and greasy under the relentless Odisha sun. Manoj Bajpayee plays him with a volatile mixture of saintly obsession and grating narcissism, and if I'm honest, the performance occasionally threatens to tip over into outright caricature during the louder arguments, yet somehow he manages to anchor the entire enterprise by never letting you figure out whether he genuinely loves the boy or just loves being the guy who made the boy. It is a messy, complicated portrait of ambition that feels lightyears away from the polished, sanitized saviors usually trotted out in mainstream Hindi movies when they want to tug at your heartstrings without actually getting any mud on their boots.

Beside him is Mayur Patole as little Budhia, the four-year-old marathon wonder who ran sixty-five kilometers in seven hours and nearly broke his own tiny heart in the process. Patole does not have the pristine, hyper-articulate delivery of a typical child actor from contemporary Hindi films, and that rough-edged naturalism is precisely what saves the movie from descending into a mawkish tearjerker about exploitation. He looks genuinely bewildered half the time, staring blankly past the camera while cameras flash and politicians hand out token plaques, chewing on his thumbnails with a vacant, exhausted stare that tells you more about the grim reality of child prodigies than any expository dialogue ever could. There is an early scene where he falls asleep mid-sentence while eating a plate of rice, his head slumping forward into the daal with a dull plop, and the director just lets the camera linger on that unglamorous moment for three beats too long. It is a small thing, but it bugged me because it felt a bit gratuitous, like the filmmakers nudging your ribs to make sure you noticed how tired the kid was.

Soumendra Padhi directs with a hand that is occasionally too frantic, jumping between hand-held tracking shots of tiny bare feet pounding against blistering asphalt and stationary, dialogue-heavy scenes that feel like they were lifted straight out of a television documentary. The cinematography by Manoj Kumar Khatoi has this bleached, over-exposed look that accurately captures the blinding glare of eastern Indian summers, though the color grading sometimes fluctuates wildly from one scene to the next within the exact same sequence. Then there is the background score, composed by Sidharth Mahadevan and Souumil, which insists on cueing up a swelling, triumphant brass theme every single time Budhia laces up his oversized sneakers. It repeats too often. It’s the kind of blunt musical cue that tells you how to feel before the kid has even taken his first stride, and the film would have been twenty percent better if they had just dropped the drums and let the sound of heavy panting carry the weight instead.

Tillotama Shome as Sukanti, Budhia’s mother, brings a quiet, simmering resentment to the periphery that grounds the whole circus in domestic tragedy. She does not get many grand monologues or explosive emotional breakdowns, but watch her hands when she hands a bowl of watery lentils to Biranchi, fingers stiff and knuckles white with a rage that has nowhere to go because society has already decided that a poor woman’s child belongs to whoever can turn him into a media spectacle. Her performance reminds me a bit of Seema Biswas in Bandit Queen, that same coiled, silent fury that makes you want to look away from the screen because you know you are witnessing a profound helplessness. The screenplay refuses to take an easy moral stance on whether Biranchi is a monster or a visionary, and that ambiguity is where the movie finds its pulse, bouncing back and forth between the claustrophobic slums and the air-conditioned offices of child welfare officers who wear crisp khadi kurtas and talk about human rights while doing absolutely nothing to feed the starving family.

Bollywood usually likes its sports dramas wrapped up in neat, triumphant packages where the underdog beats the odds against a corrupt system, but this film leaves you sitting in the dirt with a foul taste in your mouth. There is no grand climax where Budhia crosses a finish line to the sound of cheering crowds and reconciliation, just a sudden, bitter administrative halt that feels abrupt and deeply unsatisfying, which is precisely why it works. The state steps in, the cameras pack up their lenses, the crowds disperse to find someone else to gawk at, and the boy is left sitting on a wooden bench holding a pair of shoes that no longer fit him. It avoids the easy comfort of a moral takeaway, leaving you to puzzle over the wreckage of a broken childhood long after the screen goes black.