Abhay Deol wears these tinted round glasses throughout most of the runtime that slide down the bridge of his nose every time he tilts his head to deliver a deadpan bureaucratic evasion, and if I am honest, that tiny visual tic became my anchor through a picture that often threatens to swallow its own cynicism whole. Dibakar Banerjee doesn't make movies that hug you back. His camera stays at a slightly uncomfortable distance, jittery and observant, like it's hiding behind a pillar in a municipal office while a bribe changes hands. We are in some nameless, dusty Indian city where politicians want to build an international business park called Shanghai, a glossy mirage of glass and steel that requires the erasure of a few thousand slums and a few inconvenient people. It's a heavy-handed premise on paper. Yet the way the screenplay by Banerjee and Urmi Juvekar handles it feels jagged rather than preachy, dodging the usual traps that snare political thrillers in this country.

The pacing works because it refuses to accelerate just to keep your attention between text messages. You watch characters sweat through cheap polyester shirts in rooms with flickering tubelights. Prosenjit Chatterjee plays Dr. Ahmedi, an academic whose passionate opposition to the project makes him a target, and he brings a tired, scholarly stubbornness to every scene that grounds the political machinations in actual human cost. Then there is Kalki Koechlin, running around with a bruised face and a handheld digital camera, trying to piece together the truth behind a deadly hit-and-run disguised as a protest accident. Her performance lacks the polished sheen you expect from leading ladies in big Hindi films, trading glamour for a frantic, breathless energy that occasionally spills over into shrillness, which feels entirely appropriate for someone half her age and twice her depth out of her spiritual depth.

Speaking of things that bugged me, the background score by Mikey McCleary relies way too heavily on this one distorted electric guitar riff that kicks in whenever a character stares intensely at a photocopy machine. It's a small thing, but after the fourth time it punctuated a suspenseful moment of filing paperwork, I started wanting to throw my notebook at the projector. But then Emraan Hashmi shows up on screen wearing a terrible faux-leather jacket and greasy hair, playing Joginder, a small-time pornographer and wedding videographer who gets sucked into the conspiracy simply because he was filming the wrong wedding at the wrong time. Hashmi strips away all the slick pop-singer swagger that usually defines his career in Bollywood movies, replacing it with a twitchy, self-preservationist cowardice that makes his gradual moral awakening genuinely earned instead of tacked on for emotional convenience. He looks like a man who has calculated the exact price of his own integrity and found it to be roughly four thousand rupees and a safe exit out of the district.

The cinematography by Nikos Andritsakis deserves mention because it avoids turning poverty and corruption into aestheticized tourism. The colors are washed out, dominated by sickly yellows and the harsh white glare of fluorescent bulbs reflecting off linoleum floors. When characters talk, the camera frames them off-center, leaving empty space above their heads that makes the bureaucratic machinery feel cavernous and indifferent. There's a particular sequence set inside a damp government warehouse that reminded me of the claustrophobic dread in Sudhir Mishra's Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, though Banerjee's lens is less romantic and far more bureaucratic in its cruelty. Nobody here is a pure villain or a stainless hero. Even the cops, played with chilling casualness by Anant Jog and others, treat brutality like a punch-clock job they want to finish before tea time.

The central theme isn't just about political corruption or corporate greed, though the film has plenty of both to throw around. It's about how ordinary citizens get ground down into grey pulp by systems they didn't build and can't possibly understand. Pitobash Tripathy plays Arumugam, a pathetic, ambitious errand boy who worships local politicians and will do literally anything for a promotion to a desk job, and his arc is perhaps the most tragic thing in the entire production. He smiles through missing teeth while performing humiliating tasks, convinced he's on the winning team, right up until the moment the machine decides he's a loose end that needs snipping. Hindi cinema rarely allows characters to be this genuinely pathetic without turning them into comic relief or noble martyrs.

We leave these people in the middle of a mess that hasn't really been cleaned up, just rearranged to suit new power dynamics. The ribbon will still be cut on the new city, the bulldozers will roll through the shantytowns by Tuesday morning, and the men in crisp safari suits will continue to sign contracts over lukewarm tea in air-conditioned boardrooms. Deol's bureaucrat gets transferred to another desk in another dusty town, adjusting his glasses with the exact same tired sigh. It's an abrupt way to drop the curtain, leaving you staring at a black screen while the house lights come up too fast, forcing you back out onto the street.