Deepika Padukone has about four minutes of screen time in the prologue of Raabta, and she somehow manages to look completely embarrassed by the wig she is wearing. It is a strange way to begin a two-hour-and-forty-minute romance about reincarnated soulmates, though honesty is rarely the default setting for Bollywood movies of this scale. You sit there in the dark watching her gallop across some digitally rendered cliffside, wondering if anyone on set had the nerve to tell her that the dialogue sounded like it was translated from a video game manual using outdated software. She doesn't stick around long enough to find out, vanishing from the narrative before the opening credits can even finish dragging across the muddy CGI sky. What remains is a loud, deeply confused contraption that keeps trying to convince you that past-life trauma can be cured by a good hair day and an adequately lit musical number.

Director Dinesh Vijan has a bad habit of treating exposition like a scavenger hunt where the clues have been buried in cement. He bounces between a hyper-modern Budapest that looks like it was sponsored by a local tourism board and an ancient tribal war zone where everybody wears leather and eye makeup that would make Adam Ant jealous. The editing rhythm shifts constantly without any discernible logic, jumping from a breezy romantic-comedy setup between Sushant Singh Rajput and Kriti Sanon into heavy-handed historical bloodshed with the subtlety of a falling safe. It’s messy in a way that feels expensive, which is almost worse than being cheap because you can see all the money burning on screen while the plot collapses under its own weight. Somewhere in the middle of it all, Jim Sarbh wanders around doing his usual intense-stare routine, playing a villain so muddled in his motivations that you half-expect him to stop the movie and ask the audience for directions.

Kriti Sanon actually fares better than the material deserves, finding little pockets of genuine charm in scenes that are otherwise drowning in digital effects and loud brass horns. She has this way of reacting to Sushant’s relentless flirting that feels entirely human, even when the script forces her to spout nonsense about destiny and eternal bonds. Rajput, on the other hand, spends the first hour playing Shiv as such an insufferable, aggressively confident playboy that you find yourself rooting for him to fall off a bridge just for the quiet. When the film shifts gears into their past-life alter egos, both actors are forced to lug heavy furs and archaic weapons through mud pits while shouting at each other over the sound of thundering war drums. It’s a lot to ask of performers who do their best work when they are just sitting in a cafe drinking coffee, and the strain shows in nearly every single close-up where their eyes glaze over while waiting for the director to yell cut.

The soundtrack relies far too heavily on recycling old hits, dropping recognizable hooks into romantic montages just in case you forgot how to feel things on your own. There is one particular party track that plays at least three times too many, bouncing off the walls of every nightclub in Budapest until you start hearing it in your molars. When the original score tries to go big for the reincarnation sequences, it sounds like Hans Zimmer having a mild panic attack inside a wind tunnel. The cinematography matches this excess with endless drone shots that sweep over city squares and mountain ranges for no discernible narrative reason other than the camera was already up there and the rental hadn't expired yet.

Past-life romance is a tricky genre to pull off in modern Hindi cinema, mostly because it requires the audience to buy into the notion that two people falling in love today are actually just finishing a conversation they started three hundred years ago. Movies like Om Shanti Om managed this trick by leaning hard into camp and knowing self-awareness, treating the absurdity of the premise as an invitation to have fun rather than a solemn religious duty. Raabta takes itself far too seriously to allow for any actual joy, replacing wit with grand sweeping statements about fate and red silk threads tying people together across centuries. It wants to be an epic, but it lacks the patience to build a single relationship that feels real in the present moment before dragging its characters back to the Stone Age.

There is a specific kind of frustration that comes from watching a lavishly funded production completely forget how people actually talk to each other. Characters state their emotional states out loud instead of showing them, walking around like walking neon signs that flash the word destiny whenever the conversation starts to lag. Even the supporting comic relief feels like it was beamed in from a totally different, much broader television sketch that got canceled six years ago. When the climax finally arrives with a ridiculous duel involving fire and tumbling rocks, you aren't feeling the tragic weight of centuries-old love lost. You are just checking your watch to see if you can still make the late train home, hoping against hope that the credits will roll before another digital horse gallops across the screen.