Gehraiyaan

Gehraiyaan, which translates to "depth" in Hindi, keeps losing itself as it switches gears from one genre to another. It allows itself to tangle in the weeds of a failing business's confusing details, an eye-rollingly dull distraction from the romance at the story's center. Further, the filmmakers woefully fail in the management of the film's tone. At a less overwhelming running time, and with a skillful edit, this could be a modern-day noir. Instead, a story about romance and infidelity morphs into a story about business troubles, money-laundering, and fraud, then that scandal morphs again into a sinister plot about murder and survival, most of which is so buried in financial technical terms ("forensic audit," "valuation gap") that it leaves an average viewer hopelessly mired in indecipherable jargon.

From the start, the narrative reeks of impending doom, but when the doom finally arrives, despite solid performances by the lead actors, we don't care much about the compromised characters and their self-created conflicts.