Meezaan Jafri wears a leather jacket in a chawl that looks too expensive for a man who spends his afternoons shouting at union organizers. That was the first thing that pulled me out of Malaal, long before the lovers started screaming at each other across laundry lines. Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s production banner usually guarantees a certain visual weight, but here, working through debutant director Mangesh Hadawale, the gloss feels pasted onto a Mumbai that deserves better than soft-focus poverty. It is an adaptation of a Tamil hit, though you wouldn't know it from the way the street corners are lit like a high-end furniture showroom. If I'm honest, the whole enterprise smells of a launch vehicle that got lost on its way to a trade magazine, rolling out newcomers like fresh stock at a wholesale market without checking if the engine actually turns over.

Hadawale previously made Tikli and Laxmi, which had a grit that has been entirely scrubbed away here, replaced by wide angles of chawl corridors that exist purely to make the background look like a painting. The screenplay takes the original premise—a right-wing local thug falling for a displaced girl from the south—and sands down every political edge until it is just a standard boy-meets-girl routine with extra regional shouting. Meezaan plays Shiva, whose entire personality consists of brooding near water tanks and swinging cricket bats with excessive wrist action. Sharmin Segal plays Astha, who spends the first half-hour looking like she wandered onto the wrong set while searching for a costume fitting. Their dynamic is supposed to echo the combustible energy of classic Hindi movies, but the chemistry is flat, hovering somewhere between forced hostility and indifference.

There is a specific supporting actor, playing a local shopkeeper with an accent that shifts three times per scene, whose dialogue was clearly dubbed in a studio with terrible acoustics four months after they wrapped physical production. It's a small thing that bugged me through the entire second act, that hollow room echo every time he yells at the kids in the alley. Beside him, Badri Chavan brings a bit of actual street rhythm to his role as Shiva's sidekick, chewing on paan and delivering throwaway lines with a casual timing that exposes how stiff the leads are by comparison. When Meezaan tries to do anger, his nostrils flare in the exact same shape for two hours, reminding me a lot of Sooraj Pancholi in Hero, where every emotional beat is telegraphed through jaw clenching and nothing else.

The cinematography by Siddharth Diwan tries very hard to make tin roofs look romantic during the monsoon sequences, stacking blue filters on top of gray skies until everything looks like an Instagram mood board for a real estate brochure. Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s influence hangs over the musical numbers like an uninvited uncle, dropping enormous brass sections into sequences that should probably feature just a harmonium and a single broken drum. A recurring trumpet motif keeps showing up during emotional confrontations, signaling despair with the subtlety of a foghorn, and by the fourth time it blares over a close-up of Sharmin crying near a water tap, the joke is thoroughly dead. Sound design in modern Bollywood movies often falls into this trap of over-explaining the mood, but here the score doesn't just underline the emotion; it beats you over the head with it until you forget what characters were arguing about.

Underneath the gloss and the loud musical cues, the film wants to talk about xenophobia and the way local politicians weaponize regional identity against migrants from the south. Astha's family came to Mumbai looking for stability, only to find themselves dodging bricks and verbal abuse from Shiva's crew. But the script refuses to let these politics breathe, turning every social tension into a misunderstanding that can be solved by sharing a plate of vada pav in the rain. The romance takes over every scene where something dangerous or interesting might have happened, flattening the chawl politics into a backdrop for moody staring contests. When Shiva finally has an ideological awakening, it feels less like a character arc and more like a mandatory requirement for third-act redemption.

Sharmin Segal’s performance is an exercise in wide-eyed disbelief, as if she cannot quite process why the camera is lingering on her face for ten seconds after she delivers a line about rent. Meezaan has a certain physical presence, sure, but he acts like he is modeling for a fitness magazine that happens to be shooting a romance in Dharavi. Their big emotional showdown in the rain near the climax involves so much screaming that the sound mixer clearly gave up and just pushed the orchestral tracks to maximum volume to drown out the strained vocal cords. It doesn't land, not because the situation isn't tragic, but because we spent two hours watching them pose instead of talk.

Hindi films have a long history of making working-class romance look glamorous, yet Malaal doesn't even bother to make its central conflict feel real. The villains are cartoonish landlords who twirl invisible mustaches while evicting widows, and the heroes are just misunderstood boys with golden hearts under dirty vests. By the time the final frames arrive, with both leads staring into the middle distance while a tabla beats out a slow, predictable rhythm, you realize the movie has nowhere left to go and simply stops moving. There is no grand catharsis, no sharp political statement, and no memorable dialogue that stays with you past the parking lot, just two hours of very expensive lighting falling on people who look like they would rather be anywhere else.