Coffee with D

This premise had genuine potential — a journalist playing with fire to revive his career, cornered by a crime boss with nothing to lose. Instead, director Vishal Pandya delivers a half-baked thriller that mistakes melodrama for tension. Rajat Barmecha sleepwalks through the lead role with all the conviction of a news anchor reading an autocue he hasn't memorized, while the supporting cast seems equally disinterested in selling the danger. The fake video plot device that kicks everything off is so contrived and poorly executed that it immediately signals you're in the hands of a filmmaker who doesn't trust his audience's intelligence. For a film hinged entirely on verbal sparring and psychological warfare, the dialogue lands with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

What's truly frustrating is watching a thriller squander its own central conflict. The Pakistan subplot feels tacked on, the family hostage angle lacks any real stakes, and when the "unexpected turns" finally arrive, they feel less like clever twists and more like desperate attempts to salvage a narrative that lost its way three reels in. The interview itself — the showpiece moment the entire film builds toward — is neither compelling nor convincing. There's no genuine cat-and-mouse dynamic, no intellectual sparring that justifies sitting through this ordeal. Pandya's previous work suggests this incompetence is consistent rather than coincidental, and "Coffee with D" only reinforces that pattern.

Rating: 3/10