Kajol yells a lot in Helicopter Eela, and I mean a lot, often while waving a half-eaten sandwich or chasing her twenty-year-old son down a Mumbai college corridor. If I'm honest, it gets grating around the forty-minute mark, turning what should feel like desperate maternal anxiety into a persistent high-frequency whine that vibrates straight through the cinema seats. We are meant to find this endearing, this single mother who enrolls in the same campus as her reluctant offspring just to finish her degree and keep tabs on his growing mustache, but the screenplay by Mitesh Shah and Anand Gandhi has other ideas about subtlety. It takes an Anand Gandhi premise—the eccentric indie intellectual flavor of Ship of Debate or Tumbbad—and flattens it out into a bright, loud, relentlessly busy star vehicle that doesn't quite know where to put its hands. The direction by Pradeep Sarkar tries to split the difference between a heartfelt family drama and a broad campus comedy, swinging wildly between melancholic flashbacks of Eela's forgotten singing career in the nineties and slapstick scenes involving professors who look like they wandered in from a completely different picture.

Let's talk about the kid because Riddhi Sen has a tough job here. He plays Vivan, the son who just wants his mother to stop showing up in his philosophy lectures with a Tupperware box full of dhokla. Sen won a National Award for Nagarkirtan and he brings a certain weary, hunted look to his eyes that saves the film from becoming an absolute cartoon, reacting to Kajol's theatrical swoops with the deadpan exhaustion of a teenager whose parent has just tried to use slang on a family WhatsApp group. He doesn't do much heroic lifting in the script, mostly standing around looking mortified while his mother dances with his classmates or sings old jingles into a desk lamp, but his quiet frustration grounds the domestic scenes. Tota Roy Chowdhury pops up as the estranged husband who left years ago to find himself or paint or whatever it is middle-class fathers do in these Hindi films when they need to clear the screen for mother-son bonding, and he has this one beige cardigan he wears in every flashback that really deserved a supporting actor credit.

The music, composed by Amit Trivedi and Raghav Sachar, suffers from an unfortunate repetition bug where the upbeat campus anthem plays every single time Vivan walks across a courtyard, which is about four times too many per reel. It's a small thing, but it bugged me every time that brass hook kicked in, signaling joy with the subtlety of a foghorn. The cinematography by Sirsha Ray tries to paint the campus in these hyper-saturated, sun-dappled hues that make Mumbai look like a glossy Instagram reel financed by a stationery brand, washing out the grime and the actual sweat of city life until everything feels a bit too clean and stage-managed. When Eela sits on her balcony looking at the skyline, the lighting changes three times in the span of a single conversation, an editing goof that lingers just a beat too long on her reaction shot, leaving us to wonder if the continuity supervisor had already gone home for samosas.

The film wants to talk about empty nest syndrome and the identity crisis of women who give up their dreams for motherhood, which are real, heavy things that deserve better than neon outfits and forced comedy sequences. Eela was an aspiring playback singer before she got married, and the movie occasionally remembers this, cutting to grainy footage of her recording studio days where she looks genuinely alive in a way she never quite manages on the modern college campus. But the script keeps dragging her back down into goofy antics, having her fail exams in the most embarrassing ways possible just to manufacture cute bonding moments with kids half her age. It is a weirdly anxious narrative that seems terrified of letting its protagonist sit with her own sadness for more than thirty seconds without cutting to a background dancer doing a backflip. Kajol has always been an actor of immense, kinetic presence, the kind of screen natural who doesn't need to try very hard to command attention, yet here she is directed to push every single emotional beat into the red zone, shouting her lines with a fixed grin that makes you yearn for the effortless, casual menace she brought to Gupt twenty years ago.

There is a specific kind of middle-of-the-road Hindi cinema that exists purely to give a major star a platform to be wacky and emotional in equal measure, and this fits squarely into that tradition without offering much else to chew on. By the time the central conflict resolves itself through a very convenient public singing audition where everyone cries on cue, you feel less like you have witnessed a profound personal journey and more like you have survived a two-hour lecture from an overly enthusiastic aunt who refuses to leave the living room. The supporting cast of college students drift in and out of scenes like cardboard cutouts, mouthing lines about chasing your passion and letting your parents live their own lives, delivering dialogue with the wooden stiffness of people reading off cue cards just out of frame. It is not a complete disaster, because Kajol's sheer star wattage occasionally cuts through the clumsy framing and the over-scored emotional swells, but it is a thoroughly exhausting experience that mistakes volume for depth and activity for growth.