There’s much to appreciate here, but you can’t help feeling it could have been so much more.

‘David’ speaks of a new kind of Bollywood which doesn’t want to be slavish to stars or formulae. But it also speaks of a filmmaking which isn’t quite as accomplished as it would like to be, or should be. It points to the presence of craft, sure, but craft which should be paying much more attention to the crucial elements of centrality and coherence. ‘David’ coasts on a few startlingly sharp scenes and zippy musical interludes, but doesn’t add up to the sum of its zanier parts.

In terms of filmmaking, David is an uncompromised experiment and steers clear of comfort zones crediting its viewers’ capability to join dots without excessive spoon-feeding, a practice that eludes mainstream Hindi cinema.

DAVID is more style, less substance. A few moments do stand out, but they are few and far between. Coming from the director of SHAITAN, this one’s a mega disappointment!