Ashutosh Rana makes a specific noise in the second half of Chicken Curry Law that sounds like a wet leather boot being pulled out of thick clay, and if I am honest, that is the exact sound I kept coming back to while trying to process the rest of it. It’s a throat-clearing grunt that he deploys whenever the opposing counsel says something particularly galling, a little micro-expression of absolute exhaustion that feels entirely earned by any actor forced to navigate dialogue this aggressively literal. Hindi movies have a long and storied history of treating the courtroom like a proscenium arch where every emotional beat must be hammered home with the subtlety of a falling anvil, but director Shekhar Suri seems to have skipped the anvil phase entirely and gone straight to dropping freight trains on the audience. The screenplay, credited to Divya Sharma, lurches forward through scenes that refuse to breathe, stacking exposition on top of exposition until the characters are essentially just standing in front of mismatched backdrops shouting their motivations at the lighting rigs. Natalia Janoszek plays Maya, a Polish dancer who finds herself stranded in a nightmare of institutional apathy and violent assault, and she spends a large portion of the runtime wearing a look of stunned disbelief that occasionally crosses over into looking like she forgot whether she left her oven on back home. It is a demanding role, requiring her to sob convincingly while reacting to legal arguments translated through earpieces and reacting to crowds of extras whose enthusiasm for jeering seems entirely untethered to whatever nonsense the prosecuting attorney is currently blathering about.

Makrand Deshpande shows up as well, doing that thing with his hair where it looks like he’s just survived a moderate-sized electrical fire in a wind tunnel, playing a defense attorney who apparently believes that shouting every third word constitutes a compelling closing argument. His performance belongs in a completely different movie, maybe a broad farce from the late nineties or one of those regional crime thrillers where everyone sweats profusely and chews on neem twigs. That kind of tonal splintering is everywhere in this production, pulling the viewer in four directions at once without ever establishing a steady baseline of reality. Bollywood has certainly produced its share of messy social issue dramas that stumble over their own earnestness, yet few manage to combine this level of aesthetic stiffness with such a wildly erratic sense of pacing. Scenes end abruptly, often cutting off a character mid-syllable to drop us into a wide shot of a Delhi intersection that has been color-graded to look like an expired polaroid from someone's gloomy family vacation in 2004. The editing by Vinod Kumar feels less like a series of creative choices and more like an ongoing rescue mission, desperately splicing together reaction shots that don't quite match the eyelines of the actors speaking opposite them. One supporting actor in the police station sequences is so clearly dubbed by someone standing three feet away from a cheap USB microphone in a carpeted wardrobe that every time he opens his mouth the audio fidelity shifts radically, dropping all ambient room tone and plunging us into a sterile, dead-air vacuum.

The cinematography relies heavily on the kind of aggressive Dutch angles that went out of style around the time everyone stopped making music videos for rock bands with names like Suede, tilting the camera whenever a character feels nervous or confused about why they are standing in a municipal corridor. It’s a visual tic that becomes exhausting long before the midpoint, cheapening the gravity of the subject matter by constantly signaling that we should be feeling anxious right now, as if the screaming string cues weren't already hammering that point home with sledgehammer force. The soundtrack, composed by multiple hands, recycles the exact same four-note piano motif every time Maya remembers the traumatic incident, dropping it into the mix with such monotonous frequency that you start anticipating the exact beat of the downbeat. That kind of sonic redundancy drains the drama from the scenes, turning moments of genuine horror into a predictable exercise in button-pushing. When compared to a film like Pink, which handled a strikingly similar thematic trajectory with an acute awareness of spatial geography and measured pacing, Chicken Curry Law feels like a rough draft that was accidentally rushed into a high-end mastering suite while the ink was still wet on the page. Aniruddh Dave pops up briefly as well, playing a corrupt politician with the kind of mustache-twirling glee that makes you wonder if he wandered in from a completely different set and nobody had the heart to tell him to tone it down for the cameras.

The core issue here is not that the film tackles a heavy and difficult subject—there is always room for cinema that wants to engage with the brutal realities of justice systems failing marginalized women—but that it does so with zero trust in the audience's capacity for inference. Every single thematic point is articulated three separate times by different characters in ascending order of volume, ensuring that no nuance survives the journey from script to screen. When Maya finally takes the stand to deliver her testimony, the camera pushes in so tight on Janoszek's face that you can count her eyelashes, a technique meant to convey raw vulnerability that instead feels suffocating and manipulative, denying the character any interiority beyond her immediate suffering. The legal arguments presented by Rana and Deshpande drift away from actual jurisprudence into bizarre philosophical tangents about national pride and the sanctity of guests, which feels particularly bizarre given that the plot hinges on a heinous crime committed against a foreign visitor. It’s a narrative choice that reflects a broader confusion about what kind of story the filmmakers actually want to tell, oscillating wildly between a gritty procedural and a melodramatic fable about the moral rot eating away at the edges of urban society. By the time the courtroom erupts into yet another chaotic shouting match with spectators climbing over the wooden benches and the judge banging his wooden mallet until the head flies off, you aren't feeling righteous anger or cathartic release, just a dull ringing in your ears and a vague, persistent wonder about why the lighting continuity in the back row of the gallery changed so drastically between shots.