Kapoor's left eye squints every time someone mentions a merger, which is four minutes into the film and feels like forty. If I'm honest, the opening scene is a bit of a mess with the sound mixing, dialogue overlapping background chatter in a way that makes you reach for subtitles that aren't there on the screener. That squint becomes the whole movie. You watch it and you think of Corporate, that other Hindi film from a decade back that tried to do the boardroom thriller thing without laughing at the expense of the guys in charcoal suits. Except here nobody is particularly thrilled to be in the boardroom.

Director Shubhashish Bhutiani or rather Shubhashish Bhutiani's cinematographer makes these corporate offices look like aquarium tanks where the oxygen is slowly running out. There's a particular shade of bruised fluorescent green that coats every conversation in the Kapoor household, making the family dinners look less like bonding rituals and more like hostage negotiations conducted over cold butter chicken. The screenplay has this habit of letting scenes drift past their expiration date. Characters linger in doorways saying goodbye three different times, once with a briefcase, once without, and then once more just to drop a passive-aggressive comment about a cousin who bought a flat in Gurgaon.

Rajat Kapoor plays the kind of man who spends fifty lakhs on a car without checking the boot space because his driver handles that kind of detail. He does this thing with his mouth where he sort of chews on his lower lip whenever his daughter talks about moving to Berlin that tells you everything about thirty years of bad marriages and missed flights. Then Kalki Koechlin shows up as the corporate raider from New York who uses words like synergy and bandwidth while wearing linen trousers that cost more than my first second-hand motorcycle. She brings a restless physical energy to the frame that makes Kapoor look like a piece of heavy mahogany furniture left out in the rain.

Shiv Pandit is also in it, playing the dutiful son with an earnestness that occasionally borders on background wallpaper. He has to carry the emotional slack whenever Kapoor and Koechlin are staring each other down across a glass conference table. It's a small thing but it bugged me how his hair length changes between the exterior shots and the office interiors. Continuity errors are normal in independent cinema on tight budgets, sure, but when a guy's fringe goes from shaggy indie-rocker to neat corporate side-part between two cuts of the same conversation, you get pulled right out of the fiction.

The soundtrack relies heavily on these muted cello scrapes that try to tell you when someone is feeling alienated from their cultural roots. We get it, the globalization of Delhi is loud and lonely. The cello doesn't need to underline every time a character looks out a tinted window at a flyover under construction. The sound design is far more effective when it drops the music entirely and just lets you hear the hum of an air conditioner struggling against a forty-degree afternoon in Greater Kailash.

What saves the picture from becoming just another dour lecture on how money ruins families is the sheer messiness of the domestic scenes. The domestic staff have more dignity than anyone on the board of directors, which is an old trope in bollywood movies, but here it's handled without the usual sentimental violin swells. When the cook complains about the new induction stove because he misses the old gas burner, the argument carries more weight than the actual takeover battle for the family snack-food empire. It is about who controls the spice cabinet and who gets to decide when the electricity bill gets paid.

There is a scene near the middle where Kapoor has to fire his oldest friend over a lukewarm cup of instant coffee. The framing puts the coffee mug right in the foreground, dead center, slightly out of focus, steaming away while two men who grew up together in Karol Bagh talk about stock options and severance packages. It is uncomfortable to watch. It avoids the easy tears you usually get in mainstream hindi films when friendships dissolve over money. Kapoor doesn't look sad so much as he looks like he's trying to remember if he locked his office door.

Koechlin doesn't get enough to do outside of her boardroom monologues, which is a shame because whenever she gets to just sit in a car and look exhausted by the jet lag, the character feels three-dimensional. Most contemporary hindi movies are terrified of letting their actors just be tired without needing a dramatic reason for it, but this one lets people yawn mid-sentence. You see the bags under eyes that have looked at too many spreadsheets on flights across three time zones.

The thematic weight settles entirely on the absurdity of selling a company that makes traditional Indian snacks to a multinational conglomerate that wants to turn burfi into protein bars. It is a very specific kind of middle-class anxiety that has haunted urban India since the nineties liberalization policies opened the floodgates. Nobody is weeping for the loss of heritage except the old guard who are about to buy farmhouses in Himachal with their payouts. The irony hangs in the air like dust motes in a sunlit living room.

The color grading in the second half shifts toward a muddy amber that makes everyone look like they have hepatitis, and I am still not sure if that was an artistic choice or a digital DI screw-up during post-production. It makes the night scenes look particularly murky, shadows swallowing actors whole until only their white shirt collars are visible against the dark leather of a Mercedes backseat. Some of the editing cuts are so abrupt they feel like missing reels, dropping us from a high-stakes negotiation straight into a silent kitchen where someone is peeling an orange for five unbroken minutes.

Kapoor carries the whole enterprise on his slumping shoulders. He wears those ill-fitting suits with the resignation of a man who stopped caring about his tailor in 2008. If the plot mechanics of the hostile takeover get a little muddy toward the end, with lawyers shouting jargon about share dilution and proxy fights, his face keeps you anchored to the floorboards. You stay for the small humiliations. You stay to watch a man realize that nobody in his family actually likes the snacks that made them rich.