There is a specific kind of background score cue in Bollywood movies that plays every single time a character looks out a rainy window, and if I am honest, LoveYatri relies on that exact frequency so often my teeth started aching by the interval.

You sit in the dark and you wait for something to happen to Sushrut and Michelle, which is a bit like waiting for a very polite bus that stops at every single puddle between Mumbai and London.

Ayush Sharma plays Sushrut with the earnest expression of a golden retriever who has been handed a calculus textbook and told to find the derivative.

He smiles a lot.

He dances with an athletic precision that suggests he spent six hours a day with a personal trainer and zero hours in an acting workshop, which makes his scenes opposite Ronit Roy look like a tennis ball being hit by an industrial hydraulic press.

Ronit Roy brings a kind of heavy, weathered gravity to the proceedings as the strict uncle who clearly wandered in from a much better drama and decided to stay out of sheer professionalism.

He glares at things.

He folds his arms.

He sells every single line of dialogue about family honor and traditional values like he is reading Shakespeare to a hostile room of tax auditors, completely ignoring the fact that the script around him is basically a series of garish music videos stitched together with thread made of cotton candy and desperation.

Warina Hussain floats through her debut with the ethereal detachment of someone who was told she only needed to look photogenic under strings of yellow festive lights and never received a second note from the director.

Her chemistry with Sharma is lukewarm tap water left in a paper cup on a hot afternoon.

They meet during Navratri in Gujarat, where the cinematography by Jishnu Bhattacharjee turns every circle of dancers into a high-saturation postcard for a tourism board that probably paid for half the catering.

The sticks clash.

The lehengas spin.

The camera swoops around their heads with a dizzying crane shot that feels less like a narrative choice and more like a camera operator who drank four espressos before the take and forgot how to lock the tripod.

Abiraj Minawala directs his first feature film with the breathless enthusiasm of an assistant director who inherited a blockbuster budget and a pre-approved playlist from a pop-music label executive.

Scenes do not transition so much as they dissolve into the next bright outfit.

The plot stumbles from Vadodara to London without earning a single mile of the journey, trading the sweaty, chaotic energy of actual garba grounds for the sterile, rain-slicked pavement of a British housing estate that looks suspiciously like a studio backlot in Greater Noida.

It is the kind of storytelling where characters explain their feelings directly to stray dogs and portrait photographs because trusting the audience to pick up on subtext would require having subtext in the first place.

This is a movie that looks at Salman Khan’s earlier home productions and decides that what those romances needed was less friction and more pastel-colored shirts.

Remember Maine Pyar Kiya, where an entire relationship had to claw its way through class barriers, parental disapproval, and pigeons carrying love letters?

Here, the biggest obstacle between the lovers is a mild bureaucratic hiccup regarding a visa and an uncle who frowns at dinner parties.

The script by Jasmeet K. Reen treats conflict the way a luxury hotel treats dust.

It sweeps it under the rug immediately so nobody trips on their way to the next dance number.

Tanishk Bagchi’s soundtrack takes over the narrative for stretches so long you forget why anyone was running away from home or who was mad at whom.

Chogada comes on and everyone forgets they are supposed to be pining.

Then it comes on again thirty minutes later as a remix.

Then it plays softly in the background while someone eats an ice cream cone.

It’s a small thing but it bugged me that every single person in London seems to own traditional Gujarati festive wear just sitting in their closets, ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice for a flash mob in a public square.

Hindi films have always played fast and loose with geography and logistics, yet LoveYatri achieves a special kind of geographical amnesia where cities possess no traffic, no rain gutters, and no people who aren't currently participating in a choreographed routine.

The thematic ambitions of the project never stretch past the idea that love conquers all obstacles, provided those obstacles can be solved by performing a synchronized folk dance in front of a monument.

There is no grit underneath the fingernails.

There is no sweat that doesn't look like glycerin applied by a makeup artist between takes.

Sharma tries his hardest to anchor the emotional beats with big, glistening close-ups where a single tear escapes his left eye with the punctuality of a Swiss train.

It fails to move you because the film spends no time establishing what these two people actually talk about when the music stops playing and the extras clear out of the frame.

Romance requires conversation, or at least shared silence, but LoveYatri only offers a series of loud entrances followed by slow-motion hair flips.

By the time the credits roll over a blooper reel that looks suspiciously identical to the actual movie, you are left wondering who this was made for.

It is not offensive enough to get angry at, nor is it sharp enough to quote on the drive home.

It sits there on the screen, bright and empty like a storefront window display for a shop that went out of business six months ago but forgot to turn off the neon lights.