Pankaj Kapur wears a red wig for about twenty minutes in the middle of Vishal Bhardwaj's Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola and if I'm honest I still cannot tell you why, though it probably made sense in the writer's room at three in the morning over cold tea and loose tobacco. It is that kind of picture, swinging wildly between jagged political satire and broad rustic farce without ever quite checking if the wheels are still bolted to the axle. Vishal Bhardwaj has never been a filmmaker who worries too much about polish, preferring instead to throw large amounts of chaotic energy at the screen and see what sticks to the drywall. Sometimes you get Maqbool, a cold and greasy machine of a movie that turns Shakespeare into something genuinely dangerous. Other times you get this, a chaotic hodgepodge of corporate land grabs, revolutionary poetry, drunken billionaires, and pink buffaloes that wanders around the dusty plains of Haryana looking for a point to land on. The screenplay, which Bhardwaj co-wrote with Abhishek Chaubey, tries to juggle too many bowling pins at once and ends up dropping most of them on the audience's toes. You have Harry Mandola, a capitalist tycoon who drinks himself into socialist hallucinations whenever he needs to feel a shred of a conscience, and you have his daughter Bijlee, played by Anushka Sharma with a cigarette permanently wedged between her fingers and a voice that sounds like gravel sliding down a tin roof. Then there is Matru, played by Imran Khan with a scruffy beard and a communist pamphlet stuffed into his back pocket, moving through the narrative like an earnest ghost who wandered onto the wrong set. The whole thing operates on a high-frequency hysteria that never lets up, meaning that even the quiet moments feel like they are being shouted through a megaphone across a crowded railway platform.

The performances are all over the map, mostly because the tone keeps shifting beneath the actors' feet like quicksand during a monsoon. Pankaj Kapur eats the scenery with a spoon and then asks for the table legs as dessert, chewing through his drunken monologues with a ferocious glee that makes you forgive the sheer ridiculousness of his character arc. He is loud, he is theatrical, and he is entirely captivating even when the dialogue he is given sounds like a Wikipedia article on agrarian reform rewritten by a madman. Anushka Sharma matches his energy for the most part, though her accent wobbles between a polished Delhi boarding school and a caricature of rural swagger that feels entirely borrowed from other, louder hindi movies. She has a real physical presence here, throwing herself around the frame with a loose-limbed abandon that keeps the screen from dying during the sluggish second act. Imran Khan, on the other hand, struggles to find purchase in a role that requires him to be the ideological anchor of a film that has no intention of staying still. He tries his best with the poetry and the soulful stares, but he lacks the grit needed to make Matru feel like a man who has lived through actual hard times instead of just reading about them in a Delhi University library. Then there is Shabana Azmi as the scheming politician Chaudhry Devi, wearing oversized sunglasses and a permanent sneer that suggests she knows the movie is a bit of a mess but decided to collect her paycheck and have fun anyway. Arya Babbar wanders in every now and then as her son, the prospective groom who is meant to represent the vacant face of modern corporate ambition, though he is given so little to do that he mostly just serves as furniture with speaking lines.

Visually, the film is a strange beast, drenched in an artificial golden-hour glow that makes the dusty Haryana villages look like a surrealist postcard designed by a committee of bureaucrats. The cinematography by Pankaj Kumar leans heavily on wide lenses and exaggerated close-ups, creating a distorted view of the world that matches Harry Mandola's boozy haze. But there is a supporting actor near the back of the village scenes who is so clearly dubbed in a recording studio in Bandra that every time he opens his mouth the audio delay pulls you entirely out of the illusion of the scene. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time he appeared on screen, that terrible disconnect between throat and voice. The soundtrack, composed by Bhardwaj himself with lyrics by Gulzar, fares much better, threading the needle between folk rhythms and jagged modern instrumentation. The title track gets hammered into your brain through sheer repetition, playing over scene transitions and background radio chatter until you are humming it against your will while brushing your teeth the next morning. Gulzar's words are as sharp as ever, cutting through the general nonsense of the plot to remind you that beneath the pink buffaloes and the slapstick drunkenness, there is an actual anger about the way land is being stolen from people who have nothing else to their name.

The thematic machinery of the film wants to say something urgent about the destruction of rural communities by the unholy alliance of corrupt politicians and multinational corporations, which is a very standard target for contemporary bollywood, but it struggles to find a coherent angle of attack. Sometimes it feels like a genuine left-wing critique of neoliberal expansion, and ten minutes later it turns into a goofy romantic comedy where the biggest problem is who gets to marry whom at the village temple. This tonal schizophrenia is exhausting, refusing to let the audience settle into any single mood for more than a few minutes before yanking the steering wheel in the exact opposite direction. You can see the ghost of a better film trapped inside this bloated runtime, something leaner and meaner that didn't feel the need to include musical numbers about pink animals just to keep the audience awake during the expository scenes about real estate acquisition. It tries to be a modern fairy tale and a gritty political drama at the same time, ending up as neither, a middle ground that satisfies nobody who came looking for either solid social commentary or straightforward entertainment.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that sets in about two hours into a picture like this, when you realize the plot isn't going to tighten its belt and the characters are just going to keep running around the same dusty courtyard shouting about revolution and whiskey. It refuses to die quietly, dragging itself through a convoluted climax involving tractors, hijacked trains, and a wedding that nobody in the audience cares about by that point. By the time the credits finally roll, you are left with a collection of memorable images—Kapur in his absurd red wig, Sharma holding a smoking shotgun, a bizarrely CGI-heavy livestock wandering through a sugarcane field—that don't add up to a coherent whole. It is an ambitious failure, which is usually more interesting than a safe mediocrity, but ambition alone does not keep a narrative from collapsing under the weight of its own eccentricities. You leave the theater with a ringing in your ears and a vague irritation that everyone involved didn't just take a deep breath and tell a simpler story.