Vidya Balan adjusts her glasses for the fourth time in two scenes and if I am honest that tiny repetitive business started wearing on my nerves before the first twenty minutes had even dragged themselves across the screen. It is a small thing. It is a stupid thing to fixate on when a movie is trying to tackle a rare genetic disorder with a straight face and a budget that probably could have funded three mid-tier romantic comedies instead. But movies are made of tiny things, thousand-yard stares, weirdly colored curtains, actors clearing their throats when they forget what to do with their hands, and Paa has plenty of those. Most hindi movies would have wrapped this premise in twenty minutes of soaring strings and weeping relatives before cutting to an intermission that leaves you wanting to raid the snack bar just to escape the emotional bludgeoning. Balki decided to do something slightly different here, or at least he decided to cast a superstar as a twelve-year-old boy with progeria and let the prosthetics department do the heavy lifting while the audience sat there wondering how long the glue would hold up under studio lights.

Amitabh Bachchan is under four hours of silicone and body padding playing Auro, a kid whose biological clock runs roughly eight times faster than normal, which means he sounds like an old man and looks like a drawing by someone who has never actually seen a child. You forget it is him after about twenty minutes because the voice work is so thoroughly grounded in petulance and weirdly specific juvenile rhythms that you stop looking for the man behind the makeup and just start watching the performance. It is not subtle. Nothing in this film is subtle, from the sunlit colonial corridors of the school to the aggressive cheerfulness of the background score that keeps telling you when to smile and when to feel a sudden twinge in your chest. Yet Abhishek Bachchan shows up as his politician father and plays the part with such casual, almost insulting blankness that you wonder if he knew which movie he was wandering onto. He is supposed to be this idealistic young leader shaking up the old guard, but mostly he just stands in living rooms wearing linen shirts that cost more than my first car, looking vaguely concerned about things he doesn't quite understand. It reminds me a bit of his work in Sarkar where he mostly just had to narrow his eyes and exist in the frame without letting any actual interior life leak out of his pores. Paresh Rawal gets stuck playing the grandfather with a heart of gold and a supply of folksy wisdom that makes you want to throw a heavy paperback at the television, though he delivers every clunker with the kind of bruised professional dignity that almost makes you forgive the screenwriters for writing dialogue that sounds like it was translated from a self-help pamphlet written in 1994.

Balki directs like a man who just discovered television commercials and decided to stretch every single framing device out to movie length without ever varying the focal length or the lighting scheme. Everything looks like it was shot inside a detergent commercial where nobody is allowed to sweat or drop a crumb on the sofa. There is no grit, no grease, no sense of actual lived-in chaos in the houses these people inhabit, just endless expanses of pale wood and potted plants that look like they get dusted twice a day by a production assistant with a feather duster. The camera moves only when it has to, panning across conversations with the mechanical indifference of a security monitor watching an empty parking lot, and the soundtrack sits on top of every emotional beat like an overbearing aunt who won't stop commenting on your weight. Yet the central relationship between the mother and the son works in spite of all this plastic gloss because Balan has this terrifying ability to cry from just one eye while keeping the other completely steady and focused on the script requirements. She plays Vidya, a gynecologist who had a child out of wedlock during college and decided to raise him alone in a sprawling apartment that defies all known economic logic for a single mother working in urban health. When she talks to Auro, her voice drops an octave and she stops being the polished, independent professional the screenplay keeps insisting she is, turning instead into someone who is genuinely terrified of the calendar on her kitchen wall.

The screenplay treats its central medical condition less as a reality to be explored and more as an elaborate metaphor for how quickly life slips through our fingers, which is fine if you like your melodrama with a side of biology. Auro's friends at school treat him with an angelic tolerance that has never once existed in any school on this planet, let alone one where kids are usually trying to figure out the most efficient ways to destroy each other's self-esteem. There is a running bit about political campaigns and municipal elections that feels like it was written by someone who read a single newspaper article about democracy in India and decided they understood the entire machinery of state power. It is naive. It is aggressively, almost insultingly simple-minded in the way it imagines that a young politician can change the system just by being honest and having a really good posture during television debates. But then Auro enters the room and starts talking about his video games or his hatred of vegetables, and the political nonsense fades into the background because the kid is genuinely funny in that specific, obnoxious way that only pre-teens with too much time on their hands can manage. The film understands the particular cruelty of children who don't know how to look away from something that scares them, even if it sanitizes the cruelty just enough to keep the family audience from shifting uncomfortably in their plush theater seats.

Cinematography by P.C. Sreeram usually brings a certain washed-out elegance to whatever frame he touches, but here he is working with a palette that feels like it was selected by a real estate agent trying to sell luxury flats to IT executives. The blues are too blue, the greens are so aggressively saturated they look like astroturf, and every sunset looks like a postcard mailed from a hill station by an uncle who wants you to know he is having a better retirement than you are. There is a recurring motif involving a bicycle ride through narrow lanes that gets repeated three separate times until you start praying for a flat tire just to break the monotony of the editing rhythm. And speaking of editing, why do certain reaction shots linger for three full frames after the actor has stopped speaking, as if the cutter fell asleep on the timeline and just decided to leave the dead air in because nobody was watching the monitor closely enough to complain? It is a small mechanical laziness that creeps into too many hindi films once the budget gets past a certain threshold and everyone assumes the star power will carry the dead weight of the scene. Yet the sequence where Auro's health finally crashes during a school play has a genuinely claustrophobic rhythm that catches you off guard, cutting between the flashing lights of the stage and the grey pallor of the boy's skin with a precision that the rest of the film's lazy commercial gloss didn't prepare you for. You stop noticing the silicone seams around Amitabh's ears when he starts wheezing on that gymnasium floor, and for about five minutes the movie actually earns every single tear it spent two hours begging for.

It is strange to watch a film about dying young that spends so much of its running time worrying about local municipal elections and whether the father is going to win his seat in the assembly. The script wants to be a fable about unconditional love and modern family structures while also offering a half-baked political manifesto about youth leadership and urban infrastructure improvement. Those two things do not fit together. They grind against each other like two different movies playing on adjacent screens in a multiplex where the sound bleeds through the partition walls until you can't tell if you are watching a medical tragedy or a campaign ad for a mayoral candidate who loves his mother. Yet the middle holds because the central trio commits to the emotional geometry of the thing even when the dialogue sounds like it was piped in from a particularly earnest morning talk show. By the time the credits start scrolling over a blooper reel that shows the actors laughing behind the scenes, you realize you have watched something that is neither a masterpiece nor a total disaster, just a very long, very loud television commercial for the enduring power of family values wrapped in a rubber suit.