There is a specific sound to a windshield wiper fighting a heavy Mumbai monsoon at night, and Reema Kagti starts her second feature right there, with that rubber-on-glass screech and headlights refracting through greasy water. I keep thinking about the way Aamir Khan’s jaw works during those early driving scenes, just grinding silently in the dark, because it tells you everything about the exhaustion weighing down a man who hasn't slept properly in a year. Most Hindi films would have turned that grief into a sweeping, weeping opera of loss right out of the gate, but Kagti and her co-writer Zoya Akhtar keep the lid screwed on tight, letting the pressure build until you can barely breathe.

Inspector Surjan Singh Shekhawat spends his nights combing through the murky underbelly of the city, hunting for answers in a high-profile car crash involving a fading movie star whose car plunged off a bridge and into the sea. It's a plot that sounds like standard genre machinery on paper, but the actual texture of the investigation feels stubbornly grounded in the damp, claustrophobic reality of a city that never really dries out. The screenplay refuses to rush its own rhythm, preferring to linger on the long, awkward silences between a husband and wife who are quietly drowning in the same shared tragedy. Rani Mukherjee plays Roshni with a hollowed-out stillness that makes you want to look away, her character retreating into church pews and late-night television while her marriage dissolves in slow motion.

And then Kareena Kapoor enters the frame as Rosie, a sex worker who possesses a strange, unsettling clarity about the world that seems to anchor Surjan just when he is coming unmoored. Kapoor does something fascinating with a role that could easily have curdled into cliché, imbuing Rosie with a quiet dignity and a sharp, defensive street-smart humor that cuts right through Surjan's gloomy brooding. Their nocturnal conversations on park benches and under flickering streetlamps form the emotional core of the movie, creating an unlikely alliance built on mutual loneliness and the shared burden of secrets they cannot tell anyone else. It's not great, not bad, just there, but Nawazuddin Siddiqui turns up in a small, jittery supporting turn as a petty criminal named Tehmur, and every time he is on screen, the movie shifts gears into something genuinely unpredictable and raw.

Ram Sampath’s score deserves a specific kind of praise for knowing when to shut up, holding back its orchestral swells until the emotional weight of a scene absolutely forces its hand. That being said, it's a small thing but it bugged me how often that one particular flute motif repeats during the transition shots, signaling the arrival of a clue just a beat before the editing catches up. The cinematography by K.U. Mohanan leans heavily into deep shadows and sickly green-yellow streetlights, making Mumbai look less like a romanticized dreamscape and more like a noir labyrinth designed to trap people who are running from their own pasts. When Surjan wanders through red-light districts and narrow alleys, the camera rarely lets us see a clear horizon, keeping the frame tight and claustrophobic so that you feel the walls closing in right alongside him.

The film wanders into the supernatural near the end, and that is where some viewers might find themselves checking their watches or rolling their eyes at the sudden shift in genre mechanics. Yet there is a strange, melancholy logic to the way the narrative weaves its ghost story into the gritty procedural framework, echoing the structural ambition of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense without ever feeling like a cheap copycat. It asks how a person survives the crushing weight of guilt when the thing they blame themselves for cannot be fixed with an arrest or a confession. Khan plays this internal fracture with a controlled burn, keeping his voice low and his movements heavy, a man physically shrinking under the weight of an unpayable debt to his own conscience.

Kagti directs with a steady, unshowy hand that trusts the audience to connect the dots without a neon sign flashing over every revelation, which feels increasingly rare in modern commercial cinema. Even when the central mystery starts to fray around the edges under the pressure of its own plotting, the emotional anchor holds firm because the actors never let you forget the human cost behind the police reports and morgue visits. It avoids the easy trap of wrapping every loose thread up in a neat bow, leaving a few lingering questions hanging in the humid air long after the house lights come back up. The whole thing stays with you, not because of some grand, sweeping statement on grief or justice, but because of the specific, bruised quietness of its final twenty minutes.