Right from the opening scene Kanu Behl, the debut director of this film, goes straight for your gut and unapologetically wrenches it out, even as he introduces you to a dysfunctional family living in Delhi. The family consists of three brothers and their father living in a shambled 'home' next to a 'nullah' that you reach after walking through a few claustrophobic, narrow lanes. The brothers live a guilt-ridden life as they earn their living through car jacking and hitting people.

There's a world of difference between red and maroon. You might not expect him to know that distinction, but Vikram does. A security guard at a mall who moonlights as a carjacker, Vikram is furious at that very fact: that you think he doesn't know better. In one of the finest performances I've seen this year, Ranvir Shorey is spectacular as the elder brother in Kanu Behl's Titli, the story of a dysfunctional family of bottom-dwellers. It is a performance of rage and nuance, of unexpected tenderness and misplaced nobility, and bloodthirsty cynicism.

Right from the opening scene, Titli snatches you from the safe and secure confines of your home and drops you amidst the violent chaos, caused by the crime inflicting dysfunctional family. Revolving around three brothers, reminiscent of our society's patriarchal hooliganism, the drama plays around with your mind in varied ways. Titli (Shashank Arora), youngest among the three, aspires to distance himself from his indignant brothers (Ranvir Shorey, and Amit Sial) owing to their dubious behaviour. He hopes for a better future.

A slow-burning, searing crime drama that shuns the conventional trappings of the genre, first-time director Kanu Behl's Titli is a remarkably sure-footed film. Its dark, disturbing screenplay (Kanu Behl, Sharat Kaytariya) explores Delhi-NCR's grimy underbelly and delves into the ugly innards of a family that subsists on the margins of the city.

First it sucks you in. Into the narrow bylanes of Delhi's underbelly; into the tiny and crowded, claustrophobic houses and into the lives of three brothers, whose address includes a gutter. They lead a life that may make hell look like a bearable hole, if not heaven. It repels you and compels you. You flinch. You wince. You even want to shut your eyes. Because you are actually made to relentlessly feel the pain the characters feel.

A family is not always a haven. It does not always cherish and nourish. It can suck out your soul, and whistle as it spits your husk out. That's what the father and brothers of Titli, the young protagonist in the film that bears his name, are to him: elders but not betters, people who lead by example, but into the abyss.

If you are familiar with the noxious, dark underbelly of Delhi, director Kanu Behl's Titli hits you in the guts right from the first frame. Because it is about a world that co-exists right in our midst, a world so lowly that we ignore but never forget while driving back home in the still of the night. Even if you haven't been to any such place in the capital, or encountered the people who inhabit these crowded bylanes, the fact is that Titli could be about any city, and its people.