I cannot stop thinking about the sound of Naseeruddin Shah chewing ice cubes during a boardroom confrontation in the middle of a very long, very loud wedding that nobody seems to actually be enjoying. If I'm honest, that small, obnoxious crunching noise tells you more about the moral rot at the center of Bornali Raychaudhuri and Director Bornila Chatterjee’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus than forty minutes of heavy exposition ever could, though we get plenty of that too.

The Hungry sets its sights on an elite Indian wedding, moving the slaughterhouse politics of a collapsing aristocratic dynasty into a sprawling, brutalist glass-and-concrete mansion somewhere near New Delhi. This is not the glossy, candy-colored universe of typical Bollywood movies where families break into synchronized dance numbers to solve their interpersonal disputes, but rather a cold, suffocating place where power is maintained through real estate manipulation, backroom extortion, and catering contracts worth more than small island nations. Chatterjee directs with a steady hand that occasionally tightens into a fist when the script demands urgency, yet the pacing drags in the second hour as characters wander through dimly lit hallways having the exact same conversation about betrayal that they had ten minutes prior.

Tisca Chopra carries the film on her shoulders as Tulsi Joshi, a woman grieving her murdered son while sleepwalking through a marriage to Shah’s terrifying patriarch, Tatvendra Joshi, whose idea of romance is whispering threats about property deeds while stroking her hair. When Chopra is on screen, staring blankly into the middle distance while guests around her drink expensive scotch and laugh too loudly at terrible jokes, the movie vibrates with genuine danger. She does not play grief as a series of loud, tearful outbursts, opting instead for a dead-eyed stillness that makes you wonder when she is finally going to pick up a kitchen knife and start slicing throats, which, to be fair, she eventually does. Antonio Aakeel brings a confused, rabbit-in-the-headlights vulnerability to his role as her doomed nephew, caught in a meat grinder of family politics that he lacks both the ruthlessness and the intelligence to survive, though his dubbing in a few crucial emotional scenes sounds just slightly out of sync with his mouth movements, a small technical glitch that pulled me right out of the tragedy.

The cinematography leans hard into claustrophobic blues and sickly greens, making the lavish wedding preparations look less like a celebration and more like preparation for a mass grave. Every surface reflects something else, multiplying the characters until the frame is cluttered with ghosts and sycophants who add nothing to the plot beyond making the rooms feel crowded and sweaty. It reminds me a bit of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool in its absolute commitment to the griminess of power, though without that film’s operatic lyricism or rhythmic momentum, trading Shakespearean cadence for jagged, modern dialogue that frequently trips over its own feet.

There is an intrusive ambient drone that kicks in whenever someone is about to make a bad decision, and after the fourth or fifth time it swells up during a lingering reaction shot of someone staring at a glass of champagne, it becomes genuinely distracting. The film wants to interrogate how patriarchal greed corrupts every single human interaction from the boardroom to the bedroom, treating emotional attachment as a transactional vulnerability to be exploited at the earliest possible convenience, which is a heavy thematic load to carry across a two-hour runtime that already feels stretched to its absolute limits by endless scenes of people driving luxury cars through fog.

Shah plays Tatvendra with a terrifying, casual cruelty that feels entirely plausible for a man who has never heard the word no in his entire life, chewing scenery and ice cubes with equal enthusiasm while his subordinates nod along to avoid getting fired or buried in the foundations of the new resort complex. When the inevitable bloodbath arrives in the final act, complete with the notorious cannibalistic banquet that Shakespeare fans know is coming, it lands with a damp, muted thud rather than a shocking explosion of catharsis, mostly because the movie has spent so much time establishing how miserable everyone is that watching them get chopped up feels less like poetic justice and more like administrative housekeeping for a poorly managed corporation.

Hindi cinema has a long, rich tradition of exploring dark familial dysfunction, but this particular experiment often feels like it is reading its own press clippings, checking off thematic boxes about corruption and revenge without trusting the audience to connect the dots themselves. The sound design deserved a better mix, especially during the wedding reception scenes where the dialogue gets completely swallowed by ambient chatter that is clearly looped in post-production, leaving actors looking like they are shouting underwater.

Chopra's performance remains the primary reason to sit through the longueurs, anchoring the bleak proceedings with a fierce, quiet intelligence that elevates the more heavy-handed Jacobean tropes into something resembling a contemporary horror story about the cost of keeping up appearances in polite society.