Rajit Kapoor spends the first twenty minutes of Shaitan barking orders at a desk that looks heavy enough to crush a man, and if I am honest, he sounds less like a grieving police inspector and more like every uncle who has ever ruined a family dinner by shouting about tax brackets. It is a specific kind of tired authority that Hindi films usually gloss over with a mustache twirl or a melodramatic tear, but here it just sits in the room like stale cigarette smoke, making everyone blink against the glare. The script wants us to feel the weight of institutional indifference, yet it keeps getting distracted by the sheer kinetic rattle of how these privileged kids talk, walk, and throw money at problems they barely understand.

Director Bejoy Nambiar shoots Mumbai like a neon-lit bruise that refuses to heal, slicing through the midnight traffic with handheld cameras that jerk and twitch as if the operator drank too much espresso and needed to lie down. This is not the glossy, drone-shot wonderland of standard Bollywood movies where every romance blooms under fairy lights and wide-angle lenses; it is a claustrophobic maze of damp underground clubs, over-lit interrogation booths, and leather car seats smelling of stale booze and cheap perfume. The editing moves with a jagged, almost impatient rhythm, cutting away from dramatic beats a fraction too early, which occasionally makes a scene feel incomplete, though it mostly keeps the dread from turning into comfortable melodrama.

Then there is Kalki Koechlin, who plays Amy with a vacant, terrifying stare that suggests she stopped living inside her own head about three days before the film started, drifting through penthouse parties and highway chases as though gravity were merely a polite suggestion. She does not give a polished performance, exactly, because her character is essentially a walking panic attack wrapped in designer denim, but she manages to make the privilege feel corrosive rather than aspirational. Around her, a sprawling ensemble cast featuring Shiv Pandit, Kirti Kulhari, and Neil Bhoopalam orbits with varying degrees of frantic desperation, all of them trying to outrun a blackmail plot that snowballs into actual bloodshed because nobody involved has the common sense to call their parents.

Gulshan Devaiah steals chunks of the picture as Karan, the loose cannon of the group whose grin looks like a jagged piece of broken glass dropped on a concrete floor, pushing every encounter past the breaking point with a terrifyingly casual grin. When he leans across a diner table to threaten a terrified bystander, you can almost smell the sweat and the desperation radiating off his collar, reminding you of Vivek Oberoi back in Company before the studio polish sanded down all the interesting edges. The supporting players fill out the edges without disappearing into the background noise, though Pawan Malhotra turns up as a dogged cop whose voice is obviously dubbed in a quiet studio three weeks after the shoot wrapped, and that minor technical mismatch pulls you right out of the grit.

The soundtrack is loud, aggressive, and sometimes deployed with the subtlety of a sledgehammer falling through a skylight, but it locks into the visual momentum so thoroughly that you stop noticing how often the electric guitars are doing the heavy lifting for the character arcs. There is an undercurrent of moral rot here that refuses to resolve itself into a neat lesson about bad company or the dangers of modern wealth, preferring instead to wallow in the messy, selfish choices made by young people who think they are smarter than the city that spawned them. It is a movie about people who deserve each other and absolutely nobody else, trapped inside a narrative engine that treats consequence like an optional software update.

Hindi cinema has spent decades trying to sanitize youth rebellion into something cute that parents can digest over Sunday popcorn, which makes the mean-spirited nihilism of this project feel genuinely jarring even when the plot mechanics start wobbling under their own weight in the third act. Rajeev Khandelwal anchors the procedural side of the madness with a weary, clenched-jaw efficiency that keeps the investigation from dissolving entirely into music video montages, though his character exists mostly to react to the chaos rather than generate it. When the credits finally drop over a pulsing bassline, you do not feel enlightened or cleansed, just slightly dirty, as though you spent two hours in a borrowed car with people who didn't bother to wipe their muddy shoes before getting in.