Another week, another commentary on uncomfortable societal truths packaged in the form of a mystery where solid performances and subtext are marred by predictable beats. At first glance, Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s System masquerades as a legal thriller, but beneath its polished exterior, it promises to lay bare the facade of institutional neutrality. It positions the courtroom not as a temple of justice, but as a theatre of social stratification where truth is a manufactured commodity.
The narrative (penned by Arun Sukumar, Harman Baweja, and Akshat Ghildial) forces a meta-textual collision. Neha Rajvansh (Sonakshi Sinha), a public prosecutor fighting the suffocating shadow of her iconic legal patriarch (Ashutosh Gowarikar), is subtly challenged from the margins by Sarika (Jyotika), a humble yet resilient stenographer who weaponises the very bureaucratic machinery designed to keep her invisible.
It is formatted as a chess match of power, legacy, and the heavy price of institutional compliance, but by the midway point, the moves lose their edge, and the loops become easy to read.
System (Hindi)
Director: Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari
Cast: Sonakshi Sinha, Jyotika, Ashutosh Gowarikar, Vijayant Kohli, Adinath Kothare
Runtime: 123 minutes
Storyline: An ambitious prosecutor teams up with a resilient court stenographer to fight for justice after a high-profile influencer is murdered. However, their legal crusade takes a deeply personal turn when they find themselves pitted against the prosecutor’s powerful father
Sonakshi captures the vulnerability of a professional who realises that the very apparatus she champions is inherently flawed. Her performance successfully highlights Neha’s internal conflict as she struggles to reconcile her ethical duty with her elite status. It seems she is cast with a purpose. Neha, in a way, mirrors her real-life experience as the daughter of an iconic father. She knows Neha must make it on her own and prove herself.
The eternal good girl Jyotika gets an opportunity to lean into a moral grey area as the underpaid, overlooked but astutely observant stenographer who has spent decades sitting at the literal feet of the powerful, and she delivers a performance rooted in absolute economy of movement. A slight tightening of the jaw, a lingering look at a case file, gives us a sense that she understands the law is not what is written in thick leather-bound books; it is what she types onto the page.
However, instead of blending into the background like an invisible cog in the legal system, Jyotika carries a distinct, sharp, and sophisticated gravitas, creating a slight disconnect with her character’s arc as the film progresses.
Ravi Rajwansh is written as an elite patriarchal father trope common in legal and corporate dramas. Gowariker’s performance saves the character from being a flat caricature, but Ravi’s motivations are highly predictable. When he asks his daughter to win ten consecutive cases before joining his firm, it promises an interesting take on nepotism, but the storytelling reduces the gatekeeping to a formulaic numbers game, built solely to give the protagonist a hurdle.
Moreover, condensing the parallel tracks of Sarika and Neha, which coalesce into a potent sisterhood against the compromised patriarchal system, into a tight cinematic runtime results in rushed, convenient resolutions that weaken the film’s depth.
After the setup draws you in, one can see an imbalance between the narrative’s thematic intent and emotional execution. As we have seen in several recent OTT films, when a viewer can spot a character’s long-term strategy from a distance, the narrative stops being a mystery and becomes a predictable checklist of talking points. For a legal thriller to land its punches, the audience needs to experience the tension of uncertainty. Gradually, the dynamic between Sarika and Neha makes Neha look less like a privileged lawyer with a blind spot and more like a simple plot device to move Sarika’s plans forward. It dilutes the credibility of both leads.
As a director trading in tangible characters and spaces, Ashwiny overcorrects by adopting high-gloss streaming aesthetics. As a result, her world begins to feel like a meticulously curated gallery rather than a breathing, chaotic legal landscape of Delhi. By sanitising these environments into neatly composed, colour-coordinated frames, the art direction inadvertently strips away the organic texture of the space.
No doubt, the point System raises that power defines truth is important and timely, but the movie doesn’t fully give its intellectual intent an emotional shape. When Sarika tells Neha that ‘justice is difficult to find like God’, she might as well be talking about the film’s missing narrative balance.
System is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video