India, May 22 -- Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari's courtroom drama System kind of starts up with a genuinely interesting setup, you know, diving into the struggles of two determined women trying to fight through a legal system that's basically stacked against them. And instead of leaning on the typical loud, hero-style courtroom theatrics you often see in Bollywood, the film kind of takes a more grounded route and keeps circling around the tense equation between a powerful public prosecutor and an intelligent court stenographer.

At first the story feels fresh, kind of like it has a lot of runway, full of possibility and a promise of an intense, very realistic legal clash. But then as the film keeps going forward, it starts to drift, slowly losing th...