Rahul Desai
That practically spells out adjectives like “hard-hitting” and “bleak” for us so that we don’t have to. It’s predictable, tasteless and frighteningly dull, ticking genre boxes because they’re cool and not because there’s a story to be told.
Over the course of one night, the delicate protagonist is forced to go from prey to predator, from victim to slasher. But her transformation is so performative that it’s funny. Apurva’s face suddenly becomes steely.
And the film knows it’s a film, but the narrative refuses to understand the relationship between survival, self-defense and cold-blooded revenge. Who has the time to stage their own entry during such a crisis?
This movie has 99 problems and a 95-minute runtime ain’t one. It’s mercifully brief, but it still manages to make us squirm (in a bad way). For the most part, the four dacoits are treated as the central characters of the story.
The film tries to be oversmart and rationalise the portrayal of these dacoits by slipping in some pop-cultural nods to masculinity. Like, for instance, one of them watching a scene from Kabir Singh and wishing he could marry a girl like that.