The sound design during the opening reel of Kaalakaandi is too loud in the top end, clipping every single time a character raises their voice in a panic, which happens roughly four times in the first ten minutes. It is a small thing, but it bugged me. You are sitting there trying to recalibrate your ears to the specific brand of urban chaos director Akshat Verma is selling, and the mix just keeps biting you in the teeth.

This is not a polite movie. Hindi movies have long pretended that Mumbai nightlife is either an endless expanse of romance or a gritty underworld populated by men in leather jackets who smoke in slow motion, but Verma drops all of that for something that looks more like a bad trip in a Bandra alleyway. The screenplay is structured around three parallel tracks that intersect with the casual cruelty of a Mumbai local train at peak hours. There is a dying man who decides to blow up his life's savings on a series of aggressively misguided bucket-list items. There are two stoners whose evening spirals into a hallucinogenic hostage situation involving a local gangster with a heart condition and a very confused sex worker. There is also a young couple on the verge of marriage whose pre-nuptial cold feet look less like traditional cinematic jitters and more like a collective panic attack. The tone shifts violently from black comedy to existential dread without asking for your permission, and if I'm honest, it often trips over its own shoelaces while trying to juggle the sheer volume of tone shifts.

Saif Ali Khan is the anchor here, playing a conservative corporate drone who learns he has stomach cancer and immediately abandons every single one of his lifelong inhibitions to wander the neon-drenched streets in a floral shirt that looks like it cost three thousand rupees at a Lokhandwala market stall. He wears a bewildered expression that never quite settles into grief or euphoria, hovering instead in that uncomfortable space where shock meets numbness. When he encounters a trans woman on a dimly lit overpass and tries to process his own mortality through a haze of pharmaceutical drugs and cheap whiskey, Khan avoids the trap of sentimental self-discovery. He just looks tired. It is the kind of performance that reminds you why he was so good in Delhi Belly, bringing that same exhausted exasperation to a script that asks him to eat rat poison, shout at strangers in Urdu, and stare blankly into the middle distance while neon signs bleed into the monsoon rain.

Around him, the ensemble cast works overtime to keep the energy from flatlining. Neil Bhoopalam and Akshay Oberoi play the aforementioned stoners with a jittery authenticity that feels less like acting and more like they were actually locked in a room with five grams of bad hash and a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Amyra Dastur pops up as the bride-to-be whose quiet despair grounds the more manic sequences involving her fiancé's nervous breakdown. Every actor seems to understand that subtlety is off the table, so they lean into the hysteria with varying degrees of success. Some scenes drag because the dialogue relies too heavily on shock-value profanity rather than actual wit, but whenever the rhythm catches, the film moves with a strange, jittery grace that is hard to shake.

Cinematographer Harshbir Singh Phull shoots the city like a living organism that has been left out in the sun too long, using harsh fluorescents and sickly greens to drain the glamour right out of South Mumbai architecture. The soundtrack, curated by various independent acts alongside standard playback numbers, punches through the dialogue scenes with a frantic pulse that sometimes overwhelms the dramatic stakes. Yet that excess is kind of the point. This is a story about people losing their minds in real-time, so the editing by A. Sreekar Prasad needs to feel disjointed, cutting away from punchlines before they land and lingering too long on blank stares.

What keeps the film from becoming just another exercise in Tarantino-lite pastiche is its underlying preoccupation with the absurdity of middle-class morality. The characters are constantly trapped by their own anxieties about what their neighbors, their mothers, or their bosses will think of them, right up until the moment death or disaster kicks the door in. It pokes fun at the hypocrisies embedded deep within contemporary Indian society, taking shots at marriage rituals, corporate conformity, and the desperate urge to appear respectable even when your entire life is falling apart at the seams. It shares DNA with quirky indie comedies from Hollywood, but it stays firmly rooted in the specific texture of urban Indian anxiety.

There is a specific supporting actor playing a local drug dealer who is clearly dubbed by someone else in a recording booth two miles away from the set, and the mouth movements never quite match the audio track during his big confrontation scene. It takes you right out of the movie for a solid two minutes. When your film relies so heavily on immersion and raw, kinetic energy, those technical seams showing up on screen tend to leave a mark. You notice the boom mic dipping into the top of the frame during a tense cab ride. You notice the extras in the background standing entirely too still while a fistfight breaks out over a bag of contaminated cocaine.

Yet these flaws are oddly fitting for a picture that refuses to smooth its own rough edges. It wants to be messy. It wants to alienate half the audience with its abrasive language and its refusal to offer neat moral resolutions to its characters' crises. While mainstream Hindi cinema usually prefers to wrap its messages in comforting blankets of family values and emotional redemption, this one just shrugs and leaves you standing in the rain with a stomachache and a bad taste in your mouth.

The closing sequence does not tie things together with a neat bow, opting instead for an ambiguous fade-out that leaves Khan's character stumbling down an empty street as the sun comes up over a garbage-strewn pavement. It is an abrupt, unceremonious way to end a ninety-minute sprint through Mumbai's underbelly, but it feels honest to the chaotic spirit of the preceding madness. You are left wishing the script had a bit more discipline, sure, but you are also glad someone was willing to make something this weird in the first place.