There is a specific kind of greenish-yellow lighting that Bollywood movies from the mid-2000s seem to love, and Alag bathes in it from the opening sequence like it's fresh oxygen. It makes every hospital corridor and laboratory look like it was scrubbed down with lime juice and bad digital grading. I'm not entirely sure why Ashu Trikha made those choices with the camera, but they certainly give the film a texture resembling a bruised lime. You sit there in the dark watching Vinod Khanna pace around a sterile room, and the visual soup just kind of hangs over the entire enterprise. It is a weirdly ambitious picture that arrived quietly in the middle of a commercial landscape dominated by glossy Yash Raj romances and broad comedies, carving out its own strange, neon-lit corner of sci-fi melodrama that nobody quite knew what to do with.

The plot kicks off with a dead scientist, a hidden bunker, and a son who has spent his entire life locked away from the sun because his biology is fundamentally incompatible with normal human interaction. Akshay Kapoor plays Tejas, the kid with the glowing skin and the telekinetic powers that activate whenever he gets even slightly stressed out. Kapoor has this heavy, deadpan stare that works surprisingly well for someone who is essentially playing an indoor plant with a high fever. He doesn't say much in the first hour, mostly because he spends it crouching in corners and avoiding direct sunlight like a teenager who has discovered the internet at three in the morning. When Diya Mirza shows up as the bright-eyed social worker trying to integrate him into society, she brings a strange, frantic energy that clashes with Kapoor’s absolute stillness in a way that occasionally generates actual tension instead of just predictable melodrama.

Vinod Khanna plays the ruthless industrialist father who locked the boy away, and he plays him with that specific brand of gravelly, aging-alpha authority that he perfected over decades of Hindi films. He barks orders, he slams doors, and he wears leather jackets indoors while looking profoundly annoyed at the concept of modern biotechnology. It is a performance that doesn't ask for your sympathy, which is refreshing in a genre that usually trips over itself trying to redeem every abusive parent through a late-act crying jag. The supporting cast features Jayant Kriplani and Sharat Saxena chewing on dialogue that sounds like it was translated from a German operating manual via a Mumbai telephone exchange. Tom Alter pops up briefly to lend some gravitas as the benevolent mentor figure who understands the boy's cellular structure better than anyone else, though his scenes are edited with the kind of lax pacing that makes you want to reach into the projector booth and speed the reels up.

Ashu Trikha's direction has this peculiar habit of lingering on reaction shots for two or three seconds longer than any human logic dictates, creating dead air that feels less like suspense and more like the editor simply walked away for a smoke break. You can practically feel the budget straining under the weight of the special effects, which involve a lot of floating glassware, flickering lightbulbs, and green-screen particles that look like they were rendered on a Pentium III in a basement in Dadar. Yet there is something strangely hypnotic about the way the film refuses to blink. It leans hard into its absurd premise about a government conspiracy and a mutant teenager without ever winking at the audience or signaling that it knows how silly it is. If you've seen Koi Mil Gaya, you know the rough emotional template here, but Alag is far less interested in sunny optimism and much more preoccupied with isolation and institutional cruelty.

The soundtrack features a couple of songs that drop in out of nowhere, stopping the narrative dead in its tracks just so characters can wander through a soundstage filled with dry ice and fake autumn leaves. One particular romantic track repeats its main hook so often during the second act that I started hearing it in my teeth. It's a small thing, but it bugged me more than the plot holes regarding government jurisdiction over private laboratories. The cinematography by Sameer Arya relies heavily on slow-motion pans around actors who are reacting to invisible CGI forces, and while the digital effects have aged about as well as a bowl of milk left on a radiator, the practical lighting choices give the indoor scenes a claustrophobic weight that digital cameras rarely manage nowadays.

What makes the movie worth talking about is its bizarre refusal to compromise on its central metaphor about society's fear of the other. Tejas isn't just a boy with powers; he's a walking pollutant to the pristine, middle-class morality of the people who stumble into his orbit. When the military gets involved and the government agents show up in standard-issue windbreakers to capture him, the film shifts gears into a standard-issue chase picture that feels like a diet version of X-Men directed by someone who only had access to five hundred extras and a rented warehouse. Mukesh Tiwari is terrifying as the heavy-set antagonist who wants to weaponize the boy's DNA, and his performance has none of the campy joy of his earlier villain roles, trading instead in a cold, bureaucratic menace that fits the movie's sterile aesthetic.

Kapoor grows into the role as the runtime stretches on, managing to convey real vulnerability beneath layers of prosthetic pale makeup and awkward hair extensions. He makes you believe that every touch hurts, that every loud noise feels like a physical blow to the sternum. The climax involves a massive standoff at a facility that looks suspiciously like an abandoned water purification plant, complete with flickering fluorescent tubes and guards running in circles while things explode in the background. It is messy and overextended and entirely too loud, much like the industry that produced it during a decade of awkward growing pains before digital distribution changed everything. You walk away from it feeling like you watched something that tried to punch way above its weight class and missed the jaw entirely, catching you on the shoulder instead and leaving a dull ache that takes an hour to shake off.