There is a specific kind of scarf Ranbir Kapoor wears in the first half of this movie that looks less like a costume choice and more like an emergency measure against an overly aggressive London draft, though I am getting ahead of myself.

Karan Johar has always directed actors as if they are standing on the edge of a precipice during an open-air earthquake, and Ae Dil Hai Mushkil leans into that architectural instability from its very first frame. The screenplay is structured like a series of increasingly uncomfortable house parties where people keep having emotional revelations in kitchens while the bass from the living room thumps against the floorboards. If I am honest, the narrative structure wobbles whenever it tries to behave like a conventional romantic drama, preferring instead to dart sideways into high-gloss melodrama that refuses to apologize for its own volume.

Ranbir Kapoor plays Ayan, a man whose primary mode of expression involves bursting into tears while wearing very expensive knitwear, and he manages to make a thoroughly irritating character almost unbearable yet weirdly magnetic. There is a scene in an upscale London bar where he has to pivot from drunken bravado to raw devastation in a single unbroken take, and he doesn't just hit the emotional mark; he completely scrambles the geography of the room. Opposite him, Anushka Sharma plays Alizeh with a jagged, fast-talking energy that prevents the film from collapsing entirely into a puddle of its own tears, treating emotional intimacy like a contact sport.

Then Aishwarya Rai Bachchan walks on screen as Saba, a poet whose every line delivery feels like it has been dipped in liquid amber and left to dry in a very expensive room, and the movie suddenly shifts gears into something much quieter and infinitely more dangerous. Rai Bachchan doesn't so much act in her scenes as occupy them with terrifying gravity, making Kapoor look like an excited puppy who has wandered into a museum after hours. It is a performance that reminds you what older commercial hindi films used to do with star power before everything got smoothed out by focus groups.

The visual palette relies heavily on Anil Mehta’s cinematography, which treats European cityscapes like giant mood boards for broken hearts, drenched in moody blues and saturated golds that make every cafe look like it belongs in a glossy magazine spread. Whenever the camera tracks backward through a crowded nightclub, you can practically smell the expensive perfume and the mild desperation emanating from the background extras, though the editing sometimes lingers a beat too long on reaction shots that have already given away all their narrative goods. Pritam’s soundtrack operates as a relentless emotional bludgeon, pulsing through the background of nearly every scene until you feel bruised by the sheer frequency of the string arrangements.

It is a small thing, but it bugged me how often that title track plays during transitions, sometimes appearing twice within the span of ten minutes as if the producers were worried we might forget what movie we purchased tickets for. That kind of sonic repetition drains the emotional weight from the melody, turning a genuinely gorgeous hook into a persistent background hum.

Beneath the designer clothes and the sweeping aerial shots of Vienna, the film is essentially an extended meditation on the indignity of being liked when you actually want to be loved, a theme that has fueled half the tragicomedies produced in Bollywood over the last thirty years without ever quite finding a stable vocabulary for it. Ayan and Alizeh’s platonic friction feels real precisely because it is messy and occasionally mean-spirited, sidestepping the neat moral boundaries of standard romance in favour of something resembling actual human confusion.

There is a distinct echo here of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, transposed into a sterile, hyper-wealthy expat bubble where nobody ever has to worry about rent or career prospects, leaving them entirely free to ruin their lives over text messages and missed connections. That shift in class context changes the texture of the heartbreak entirely, turning what used to be familial melodrama into an existential crisis about lifestyle choices and emotional availability.

The secondary characters drift in and out of the narrative like furniture that has been rearranged by an indecisive interior designer, serving mostly to facilitate Ayan’s ongoing public tantrums without offering much friction of their own. Fawad Khan shows up as a brooding musician with cheekbones that could cut glass and a dubbed voice that occasionally detaches itself from his jawline during emotional close-ups, a technical distraction that pulls you right out of the illusion.

Yet despite the tonal whiplash and the excessive runtime, there is a pulse to the filmmaking that keeps you glued to the seat even when the logic starts to strain under the weight of its own luxury. Johar is working through some genuinely dark ideas about obsession and entitlement disguised as modern romance, letting his characters behave badly without offering the audience the comforting release of a moral lesson.

When the credits finally roll, you are left sitting in the dark with a headache from the bass and a lingering irritation at how easily you fell for the visual tricks, which is probably the exact reaction the director was aiming for when he put those oversized scarves on Ranbir Kapoor in the first place.