Rajeev Khandelwal wears a ridiculous fedora throughout Samrat and Co. that looks like it was bought at a station kiosk five minutes before the cameras rolled. That hat is all I could think about during the opening twenty minutes, mostly because the movie itself gives you so little purchase on reality. Hindi films have tried to resurrect the classic gentleman detective before with wildly uneven results, but director Kaushik Ghatak approaches the genre with the subtlety of a brass band playing inside a telephone booth. We are dropped into a muddy estate called Deepgiri where rich people are dropping like flies, poisoned or pushed or stabbed while brooding against wood-paneled walls. It is the sort of plot where everybody has a dark secret involving a stolen will or an illegitimate child, though nobody seems particularly bothered by the logistics of murder. If I'm honest, the whole thing feels less like an homage to Sherlock Holmes and more like a rejected pilot for a regional cable channel that accidentally got theatrical funding.

The screenplay by Sudipto Chattopadhyay operates on a logic so elastic it practically snaps back and hits you in the forehead. Clues appear not because the protagonist deduces them through observation or intellect, but because someone leaves a diary open on a mahogany desk with the incriminating page dog-eared. Ghatak shoots these moments with heavy-handed Dutch angles that telegraph a twist long before the character even picks up the paper. You have to wonder why Khandelwal’s private eye bothers sniffing around crime scenes with a magnifying glass when the local postman could probably tell him who did it just by reading the return addresses. The pacing is wildly lopsided, dragging through endless exposition scenes where actors stand around delivering exposition in clipped, theatrical accents, only to rush headlong into a climax that resolves four separate subplots in the space of three minutes. It is exhausting in that specific way Bollywood thrillers often are when they refuse to trust the audience with silence.

As the titular sleuth, Khandelwal tries desperately to infuse the proceedings with the weary, intellectual charisma of Basil Rathbone, but he ends up sounding like an exasperated schoolteacher lecturing a rowdy classroom. He spits out his deductions with an aggressive, performative snap that wears out its welcome long before the intermission. Ramgopal Bajaj, playing the patriarch of the doomed family, wanders through his scenes looking like he genuinely cannot remember which movie he signed up for, muttering his lines at half-speed while the rest of the cast hyperventilates around him. Barkha Bisht does what she can with a character written strictly as a series of weeping reaction shots, though her dubbing is slightly out of sync in two crucial confrontation scenes near the end. It's a small thing but it bugged me every time her mouth closed a full second after the audio track finished its sentence. Ajay Bhandari pops up as the nervous nephew with shifting loyalties, sweating profusely under studio lights that must have been burning at a hundred thousand watts.

Visually, the film adopts a sickly, digital jaundice that makes every room look like it was lit by an unshaded bulb in a meat locker. Sunita Radia’s cinematography relies on endless, sluggish crane shots that swoop down over velvet drapes for no discernible narrative reason, turning what should be intimate interrogations into grand opera without the tunes. The background score by Ankit Kurmi and Gaurav Dagaonkar deserves a special mention for sheer repetition, recycling the same three-note piano sting every single time a character looks suspiciously at a grandfather clock. It’s the kind of sonic bludgeoning that reminds you why so many people stopped going to multiplexes for mid-budget genre experiments. We are told repeatedly that this estate is a place of ancient curses and modern greed, but the camera never lingers long enough on the actual environment to let any atmosphere take root, preferring instead to cut frantically between close-ups of terrified eyeballs.

There is an awkwardness running underneath the film that separates it from standard genre fare, an ambition that far outstrips the budget or the script. Hindi movies have long struggled to adapt the locked-room mystery format because our storytelling traditions lean so heavily toward melodrama and emotional catharsis over cold, clinical deduction. When Samrat tries to explain the physics of a poison dart, the movie stops dead, gasping for air between stylized flashbacks that look like they were rendered on an early-model laptop. The themes of familial betrayal and generational rot are sketched in broad, greasy strokes, borrowing heavily from Basu Chatterjee’s more grounded mysteries without any of the human observation that made those older films breathe. Nobody in Deepgiri feels like a person who has lived a life before the camera started rolling. They are simply meat puppets arranged on a chessboard to facilitate a series of gotcha moments that you can spot coming from the parking lot.

Watching this thing stumble toward its inevitable reveal in a greenhouse full of dead orchids, I kept thinking of Byomkesh Bakshi and how effortlessly those adaptations capture the musty, tobacco-stained texture of colonial-era sleuthing compared to this shiny, plastic nightmare. Ghatak has all the tools at his disposal, yet he chooses to deploy them with maximum volume and zero grace, hammering home every punchline and every plot point until you are numb to the twists. By the time the killer is unmasked and gives a five-minute monologue explaining their financial motivations, the exhaustion is total. It is not a disaster of epic proportions, and it is not a misunderstood curio waiting for rediscovery by film nerds on Twitter. It is just a very long, very loud afternoon spent in the company of a bad hat and a worse script, fading quietly from memory before you even reach the exit doors.