A toddler, doll in hand, reacts to her mother’s loving call and runs towards her. The mother — her face stained with mascara and tears and her mutilated wrist coloured by her own blood — caresses her smiling knee-high daughter and then attempts to drown her in a bathtub, the two-year-old’s helpless pleas renting the air as the mother smiles and cries at the same time.

Shaitan is the most edgy and irreverent Bollywood ride you would have taken in a long, long time. Brutal, stark and violent, first-time filmmaker Bejoy Nambiar makes his debut a dark and compelling noir about the moral and psychological degeneration of today’s youth, giving us a film that is cutting-edge and contemporary, deliciously wicked and disturbing.

Shaitan’s darkness stems from its dark characters, each emotionally bereft, quirky and living life on the edge. There is Karan Choudhury aka KC (Gulshan Devaiah), the scion of a wealthy family whose life is on as much of a speed overdrive as his car. Popping into his room for a quickie in the middle of a family puja, initiating his friends into snorting a rail or crashing a bottle on the head of a guy who hits on a girl in his group, KC is out of control and in your face.

Sharing a love-hate relationship with KC is Tanya (Kirti Kulhari), an aspiring actress prone to bouts of bulimia whose ambitious sister chooses to look the other way when a lecherous director asks her to expose her navel a wee bit more.

Masochist Dushyant Sahu aka Dash (Shiv Pandit) is the most no-nonsense of the group, his every thought, word and action being dictated by an ulterior motive. The only one with a slight hint of morality is Zubin (Neil Bhoopalam), a repressed geek who masturbates and plays video games simultaneously and whose idea of fun is to pee into water balloons and throw them at unsuspecting revellers on Holi.

The toddler who survives her mother grows up into Amrita Jaishankar aka Amy (Kalki), a socially and emotionally unhinged 18-year-old who is tormented by morbid visions of her mentally unstable mother, loving and loathing her at the same time. Sketching gruesome images of her mother or wearing her clothes and make-up, Amy finds it difficult to let the memories lie. When she meets the group of four whose predicament is not entirely different from her own, she blends in easily, gradually pulling the strings in the friendship and dictating their decisions.

There is no silver lining in these characters under a cloud. Most often, their violence is more in thought than in action. Their existence — driven by drink and dope — is a non-stop roller-coaster ride. The higher they go, the lower they plummet. Until one night, when an out-of-control ride on a dark Mumbai street results in their Hummer mauling two scooterists. Driven by fear and guilt, they don’t stop to think or rationalise, to gauge if the victims are dead or alive, brutalising their bodies further as they attempt to escape.

But murder cannot be hidden and they find themselves at the mercy of a corrupt cop (Raj Kumar Yadav) who threatens to blow the whistle if they don’t cough up hard cash. On the edge, the five think up one devious plan after another, but find themselves sinking deeper into the abyss of mistrust and misunderstanding. They quickly move from “we” to “I”, each looking to cover his back at the cost of another. Violence gives rise to more violence, one murder leads to many others.

At no point of time does Nambiar ask his audience to sympathise with his characters. They are murky with morbid intentions — and they are unapologetic about it. Putting a halt to their gruesome ride rests on the shoulders of Arvind (Rajeev Khandelwal), a suspended cop permanently on the boil who chucks a cheating husband from a terrace, but is unable to grapple with his own domestic issues. His frustration as he chases the group of amoral 18-year-olds through the seedy underbelly of Mumbai (captured brilliantly by R. Madhi) is palpable, his helplessness in the face of an uncooperative superior further accentuating his brutality.

Shaitan works because it is unapologetic and in your face, much like its characters. A heady concoction of action and reaction, dizzy drama and hard-hitting violence, Shaitan has you in its grip from first to last, keeping you glued to the edge of your plex seat.

The humour, like the rest of the film, is dark. Amy introduces her father to her new friend as fake and calls her stepmom ugly. Arvind and his wife are subjected to frustrating red-tapism when they go in for a divorce, the bored government employee carrying out her duties on autopilot, with scant regard to the emotions of the couple. And then there’s the cop on a chase who kicks an autodriver refusing to drive him down, to submission. How many times do you feel like doing that to a cabbie in Calcutta?

The lines, like the film, are smart. “What do you call a vibrator gone berserk? Dildo paagal hai!” Or when Zubin yells out to his friends: “Screw the tiger, save the Parsi!”

Most of the scenes are shot in either stark monochromes or in hyper technicolour, mirroring the mind and moods of the protagonists.

Shaitan has no songs but the background music — attributed to as many as seven composers — is retro in feel, yet contemporary in sound, contributing to the film’s edginess. Watch out for an action sequence choreographed to a remixed version of Khoya khoya chand. Heady!

Shaitan rides on the strength of its performances. Each of the actors in the ensemble is well cast, with Kalki and Gulshan proving to be the pop picks. Rajat Barmecha (Rohan of Udaan) shines in a cameo, one of the few moments in Shaitan that makes you smile. Music man Nikhil Chinapa is quite a revelation in the role of a tough cop. But it is Rajeev Khandelwal who makes Shaitan what it is. The actor who wowed us in Aamir, wows us more in Shaitan, investing his hard-as-nails cop with a dash of humour and a flicker of emotion. This is one actor we need to see more of. Make that much more.

Shaitan may be 20 minutes too long and repetitive in parts, with the drama never reaching a crescendo, but we recommend you to keep a date with it this weekend. It’s time to get high.