The sound design in Adrishya is just loud enough to be annoying without ever achieving that immersive crunch you get in a proper thriller, which is an irritating little friction that stays with you all the way home from the screening room. You sit there waiting for the mix to settle down or for the dialogue to stop sounding like it was recorded inside a tin shed during a hailstorm, but the audio gremlins persist across three separate reels. It is a small thing, sure, but when a picture asks you to lean in and track micro-expressions in near-darkness, rattling the subwoofers every time a door closes with unnecessary force tends to break the spell.

Directorially, the film feels determined to avoid the usual polished gloss of contemporary Hindi movies, opting instead for a grainy, washed-out aesthetic that occasionally works and occasionally just looks like nobody remembered to clean the sensor. There is an unmistakable looseness to the pacing, stretching scenes past their natural breaking point just to let a character stare into the middle distance while ambient traffic hums on the soundtrack. If I'm honest, some of those protracted moments threaten to put the entire row to sleep before the first real plot twist even registers. Yet there is a strange sort of stubbornness here that resists the temptation to speed things up for the ADHD crowd, preferring a slow burn that frequently turns into an outright crawl.

Nishat Mallick anchors the whole messy enterprise with a performance that relies almost entirely on tight, pinched movements rather than big emotional outbursts. She doesn't give you the standard tear-soaked monologue you might expect from standard Bollywood melodramas, keeping her cards buried so deep you start wondering if she even knows what game they are playing. That restraint keeps the narrative from careening entirely off the rails when the logic of the script starts to fray around the edges, especially during the second act where the motivations of half the supporting cast dissolve into thin air. Opposite her, 'Om' Rakesh Chaturvedi brings a weary, rumpled gravity that recalls the early supporting turns of Pankaj Tripathi, filling the frame with a kind of accidental authority.

The screenplay, credited to a crowded room of writers, lurches between sharp, naturalistic dialogue and clunky exposition that sounds like it was translated from an entirely different language by someone who had never actually spoken to a real human being. Archana Kotwal pops up in the middle stretches as a catalyst whose primary function is to look suspicious while holding various manila folders, and she handles the thankless task with admirable straight-faced commitment despite the dialogue doing her zero favors. Whenever the narrative threatens to stall out completely, the camera pulls back to reveal long, unbroken takes of dusty corridors or empty alleyways that do very little to advance the plot but somehow establish a tangible sense of place.

There is an avoidance of easy answers in Adrishya that separates it from the usual run of algorithmic streaming content clogging up your weekend queue, even if that refusal to resolve narrative threads feels less like daring art and more like a lack of budget for reshoots. You keep waiting for the puzzle pieces to click together in that satisfying way they do in Kahaani or even lesser genre exercises, but the edges remain jagged and unresolved right up until the abrupt cut to black. Hindi films have spent the last few years trying desperately to mimic Western prestige television with hyper-fast editing and neon color grading, so it is genuinely refreshing to watch something that looks like it was shot on a Tuesday by people who actually wanted to go home before dark.

The lighting scheme deserves a special mention for being uniformly murky, plunging characters into perpetual shadow even when they are standing next to a bank of large, functional windows on a sunny afternoon. You find yourself squinting at the screen trying to make out facial features that have been deliberately obscured by a cinematographer who seemingly read one too many articles about film noir atmosphere. It gets frustrating after the first hour, particularly when important plot information is being dropped in whispers while the actors' faces remain completely invisible beneath the brim of various ill-fitting hats.

Still, the picture lingers in the back of your mind long after the credits stop rolling, refusing to be easily categorized or dismissed as just another botched attempt at genre revisionism. It lacks the technical precision to be considered a major work, but it also avoids the cynical calculation that ruins so many modern Bollywood releases these days. When Mallick finally delivers her closing lines with that flat, emotionless cadence, you realize the movie was never really about the mystery at all, leaving you with an odd, nagging desire to watch it a second time just to see if the sound mix was always that bad.