Trapped

Rishab Ghai's "Trapped" is a audacious survival thriller that works precisely because it strips away all the melodrama Bollywood loves and forces you into a coffin-sized apartment with a man slowly unraveling. Rajkummar Rao delivers a genuinely committed performance—there's no showboating here, just raw desperation as Shaurya battles starvation, dehydration, and creeping madness. The premise is absurdly simple: man gets locked in, man tries to survive. But Ghai refuses to bloat it with unnecessary backstory or romantic subplot interference. The apartment becomes a character itself—claustrophobic, indifferent, slowly crushing the life out of its inhabitant. There's a purity to the filmmaking that's refreshing.

What doesn't work is the pacing in the second half, where the repetition of Shaurya's survival attempts begins to feel circular rather than escalating. The writing occasionally stumbles when trying to maintain tension over 109 minutes with essentially one location and one character—some scenes feel padded, others contrived. But these are minor quibbles with a film that had every excuse to become manipulative garbage and instead chose the harder path of restraint.

This is Ghai's best work by a country mile, a lean, visceral thriller that proves you don't need elaborate plotting or five-song montages to grip an audience. "Trapped" is cinema that respects your intelligence and your time.

Rating: 7.5/10