There is a specific kind of digital scrub on modern Hindi movies that I usually hate, where every concrete surface in a slum looks like it was art-directed by someone who has only ever observed poverty through a viewfinder coated in grey grease, but Nagpur in "Jhund" actually feels like dust and sweat and concrete that bakes until three in the morning. Vijay Barse looks at these kids kicking a football around a patch of jagged stones with no turf and no shoes, and if I'm honest, the first half hour moves so slowly I thought about checking my email.

Nagraj Manjule directs like he is allergic to the standard Bollywood pacing where every emotion has to be underlined twice so the people in the back row don't miss the joke or the tears. He doesn't give you the clean, predictable narrative arc you expect from sports dramas, preferring instead to let scenes breathe until they become slightly uncomfortable, lingering on faces that don't know what to do with a camera pointed at them. The screenplay wanders into alleyways and stays there, sometimes losing the thread of the actual tournament they are supposed to be training for, which frustrates you until you realize the film is more interested in the way these kids take up space than how many goals they score.

Amitabh Bachchan stands in the middle of all this chaos with the weary authority of a retired schoolteacher who has seen every possible variation of human disappointment and decided to care anyway, though he occasionally looks like he wandered onto the wrong set and is trying very hard to remember his blocking. He doesn't try to match the raw, street-level energy of the kids, and that contrast works because his stiffness makes him look like an outsider trying to translate a language he only studied in textbooks. He plays Vijay Barse with a low-key exasperation that feels earned, especially when he is dealing with local bureaucrats who treat human lives like administrative errors.

The kids themselves, led by Akash Thosar and Rinku Rajguru—both carrying the heavy weight of their breakout success in "Sairat" without ever leaning too hard on that film's specific brand of heartbreak—bring an unpredictable, feral electricity that makes the veteran actor look like he is working twice as hard just to keep up. Thosar has this blank, dangerous stare that tells you he is ready to throw a punch over a misplaced look, while Rajguru slips into the margins of scenes with a sharp-tongued observation that cuts through the sentimentality before it can turn into pure mush. They aren't playing characters so much as they are inhabiting bodies that have been bruised by a city that would rather pave over them than look at them.

At one point, a supporting actor delivers a crucial line about local turf wars, and it is so obviously dubbed in a quiet studio miles away that the illusion of the street drops entirely for about ten seconds, which is a small thing but it bugged me every time I thought about it later. The sound design is occasionally a mess of competing drums and shouted dialogue that swallows whole conversations, though maybe that is just what it sounds like when you live next to a crowded railway line with fifty other people in a corrugated tin shack. Sudhakar Reddy Yakkanti’s cinematography avoids the golden-hour trap that usually turns slum footage into poverty porn, choosing instead a harsh, bleached-out afternoon light that makes everyone look slightly dehydrated.

The film wants to talk about caste and class and the invisible walls that separate the gated colonies from the mud tracks, but it does so through accumulation rather than big speeches, letting the casual cruelty of a police officer or a middle-class neighbor accumulate until it feels heavier than any plot point. You can see the scaffolding of the message from a mile away, but the actors inhabit the frame with such specific, unpolished habits that you forgive the heavy-handed sociology. It’s a messy piece of work that takes too long to get to the airport sequence where paperwork causes melodrama, yet it stays with you because it refuses to give these kids a magical, clean escape hatch.

When the football matches finally start, the editing gets choppy in a way that feels less like stylistic verve and more like an attempt to hide the fact that nobody on screen is actually a professional athlete, though the enthusiasm sells the illusion most of the way. We have seen this story before in sports movies where the rough-around-the-edges team learns about teamwork and self-respect through the magic of a stern mentor, but Manjule keeps subverting the expected beats by just letting scenes trail off without a punchline. Bachchan delivers his final monologue with a dry throat and zero theatrical fireworks, sitting in a plastic chair while the kids mill around him like a swarm of bees that don't quite know where to land next.