That one lighting cue in the hallway scene makes no sense at all. Rajiv's face gets totally washed out in blue just because he walks past a neon sign, even though the room is lit by warm practical lamps that don't match the angle. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me every time it happened because the film keeps cutting back to that exact same angle like the editor fell in love with it. Samir Soni plays Rajiv, a man celebrating a birthday that slowly turns into a bad trip he cannot wake up from, and he spends half his scenes looking bewildered by things that are happening right in front of him. Direction comes from Sameer Soni too, doubling up behind the camera and in front of it, which usually leads to a certain vanity in how the close-ups are framed, but here it actually creates a claustrophobic tunnel vision where every room feels smaller than it was five minutes ago. The screenplay borrows heavily from the structural loops of The Game without ever matching that film's logistical airtightness, leaving huge plot holes that you could drive a taxi through if you were paying attention, though the pacing keeps you from dwelling on them too long. Rajiv is an ad-man with a wandering eye and a secret he's trying to bury beneath expensive scotch and smooth talk, which makes him pretty standard as far as protagonists of noir-adjacent thrillers go. He invites trouble home, or maybe trouble just shows up because the script demands it, and soon the boundary between what is real and what is just a hallucination generated by a spiked drink starts to dissolve into a muddy blur.

Enter the women who populate this nightmare, each carrying a different flavor of threat or confusion. Nora Fatehi plays Sandra, appearing in a flash of physical confidence that completely shifts the energy of the room the second she walks through the door, though her dialogue delivery occasionally trips over the dramatic weight of lines that were clearly meant to sound effortless. She has this way of holding herself that suggests she knows something nobody else at the party does, a posture of quiet superiority that makes Rajiv look like an amateur in his own house. Elena Kazan plays Lisa, the mysterious guest who arrives uninvited and stays just long enough to plant seeds of paranoia in Rajiv’s already crowded head, bringing a cool, detached European thriller energy to a setting that usually relies on domestic melodrama. Then there is Suparna Krishna as Rajiv’s wife, anchoring the domestic side of the narrative with a tired patience that feels earned through years of dealing with his late nights and half-truths. None of them get enough to do besides react to Rajiv's escalating panic, which is a shame because the movie gets much more interesting whenever the camera leaves him alone in a corner and focuses on the women shifting allegiances behind his back. The supporting cast does that thing where they speak slightly too clearly, like they are reading off cue cards positioned just out of frame, though it fits the artificial, dreamlike logic of the night.

Visually, the movie leans hard into neo-noir clichés without finding anything new to say about shadows and neon, keeping everything bathed in murky reds and deep blues that signal danger with the subtlety of a brick through a window. The soundtrack pulses with low synth basslines that rumble your seat in the theater, if you caught it there, or rattle your laptop speakers if you didn't, cycling through three distinct electronic tracks so often that you can hum them before they start. It's not great, not bad, just there, functioning as a metronome for scenes that might otherwise stall out entirely when the dialogue dries up. Hindi cinema doesn't often dabble in this kind of psychological chamber piece, preferring grander gestures and louder emotional beats, so it is kind of refreshing to see a mid-budget project try to sustain a single mood for ninety minutes without cutting away to a comedy track or an item number. Well, there are musical numbers, but they are slotted into the narrative as club sequences or hallucinatory interludes rather than traditional commercial breaks, which keeps the momentum from grinding to a complete halt.

The core issue is that Rajiv is such a self-pitying cipher that you stop caring whether he is losing his mind or just getting what he deserves. He treats everyone around him like a prop in his own private drama, and when the universe pushes back with surreal hotel rooms and vanishing guests, you mostly just want him to stop whining and take his medicine. That dynamic makes the second half drag, even as the plot twists pile on top of each other like cars in a foggy highway pileup. By the time the third woman shows up with another set of cryptic warnings, the mystery has curdled into a repetitive loop of gaslighting that lacks the sharp teeth of better psychological thrillers. Still, there are moments of genuine visual inventiveness, like a tracking shot that follows Rajiv down a corridor that seems to stretch out longer than the building's actual floor plan should allow, nodding to classic horror tropes without feeling entirely derivative.

If you have seen any number of modern Bollywood movies that try to ape Western indie thrillers by making everyone wear black and smoke in dimly lit kitchens, you already know the aesthetic vocabulary being deployed here. It is a genre exercise built on vibes rather than logic, and if you buy into the vibing, you can probably forgive the way the final fifteen minutes unravel into a heap of contradictory explanations that don't hold up to five seconds of post-credits thought. The film ends on a lingering close-up of Rajiv’s face, frozen in a half-smile that suggests he is either waking up or sinking deeper into the quicksand, and the cut to black feels abrupt rather than earned, leaving you to wonder if the editor just ran out of tape or simply didn't know how to resolve the mess they had made.