There is a specific kind of cold that hits you through a commercial freezer door, the sort that makes your eyelashes stick together if you blink too fast, and Mathukutty Xavier’s Mili tries very hard to make you feel every degree of it without ever quite freezing your blood the way you want it to. If I'm honest, I spent the first twenty minutes staring at a background extra who kept aggressively wiping the same spotless stainless-steel counter with a greasy rag, which is usually a sign that my attention span has given up on the movie before the inciting incident has even cleared its throat. Adapted from the Malayalam thriller Helen, this Hindi-language survival drama brings Janhvi Kapoor into the title role of a nursing graduate who gets accidentally locked inside a minus-eighteen-degree walk-in food locker overnight while closing up her shift at a brightly lit fast-food joint inside a newly minted Dehradun mall. You know the mechanics of the plot the second she steps through that heavy metal portal and the latch drops with a dull, echoing thud, because survival pictures of this compressed scale live and die on geography, and you spend half the runtime mentally mapping out where the vents are, how thick the insulation is, and exactly how many bags of frozen french fries are stacked against the back wall.

Xavier shoots the initial domestic setup with a breezy, almost overly sunny naturalism that feels closer to a standard television commercial for instant noodles than a precursor to hypothermia, establishing Mili’s relationship with her doting, perpetually anxious father played by Manoj Pahwa with a comfortable warmth that borders on sleepy. They share quiet kitchen jokes, argue about her career ambitions to fly abroad, and navigate the messy, lived-in reality of a single-parent household where grief for the mother still hangs in the corners like old dust. Pahwa is entirely effortless here, sliding into the shoes of a working-class dad whose entire universe revolves around his daughter’s laughter, and when the narrative finally shifts gears into panic mode, his slow-dawning dread carries more weight than all the frosted breath effects the makeup department can muster. Sunny Kaushal shows up as the boyfriend whose earnestness is so aggressively wholesome you half-expect him to break into a public service announcement, though his frantic midnight search through the rainy, neon-drenched streets of the hill station gives the second half its necessary frantic pulse even if his dialogue occasionally trips over itself trying to sound authentic.

Once the freezer door seals shut, the film becomes an exercise in physical endurance for both its protagonist and the viewer, tracking the slow, agonizing descent from mild annoyance to violent shivering and hallucinations. Kapoor throws herself into the physical demands of the role with a bruised, red-nosed commitment that defies anyone who still tries to dismiss her as a mere product of nepotism, gasping for air in the dwindling oxygen and clawing at frozen metal until her fingernails look raw. It’s a grueling, unglamorous performance that asks her to sit in snot and frost for forty minutes of screen time, and she rarely cheats the physical reality of the situation, even if the script insists on giving her flashbacks to childhood trauma when what you really want is just to watch her figure out how to short-circuit the thermostat with a broken pipe. The supporting players outside the box, including Rajesh Jais as a slimy franchise manager and Hasleen Kaur as a sympathetic coworker with her own set of mundane worries, pad out the runtime with procedural details about police apathy and frantic fatherly desperation, though the film occasionally relies too heavily on standard bureaucratic villains who seem to have wandered in from a completely different genre of mainstream Hindi cinema.

There is a recurring needle-drop during the middle stretch involving a jaunty acoustic guitar riff that plays every time Mili remembers a happy moment with her dad, and it bugs me because it completely pops you out of the claustrophobia just when the temperature is supposed to be dropping. Cinematographer Sunil Patel does better work when he keeps the camera pinned tightly against Kapoor’s sweating, freezing face, capturing the gradual dimming of her eyes with a stark, unflinching intimacy that makes the commercial kitchen feel like a tomb carved out of solid ice. The sound design works overtime, layering the relentless, low-frequency hum of the refrigeration unit beneath every gasp, every scrape of a frozen spatula, and every desperate kick against the steel door, creating a sonic cage that feels far more inescapable than the four walls themselves. While a lot of modern Bollywood projects tend to rely on bloated CGI spectacles to manufacture scale, this movie finds its power in the opposite direction, shrinking the world down to a single box and watching to see if a twenty-four-year-old actor can hold your gaze while her body temperature drops to dangerous levels.

The themes floating around the edges of the story about the casual cruelty of corporate gig work, the bureaucratic nightmare of missing person reports in urban municipal offices, and the quiet sacrifices of working-class fathers are mostly functional rather than profound, serving primarily as fuel for the engine rather than deep social commentary. You can feel the ghost of Mathukutty Xavier’s original Malayalam film haunting every frame, reminding you that sometimes a straight-up remake doesn't need to reinvent the wheel to justify its existence as long as the mechanical parts turn smoothly and the tension holds until the credits roll. By the time the police finally break through the heavy hinges with a crowbar, you feel less like you’ve witnessed a profound cinematic journey and more like you’ve just spent two hours trapped in a very cold room with someone who refused to stop screaming, which might just be the exact experience the filmmakers were aiming for all along.