Annu Kapoor wears a thin mustache that looks like it was glued on in a hurry behind a bus depot, and honestly, that’s about right for the tone Shoojit Sircar establishes in the opening minutes of Vicky Donor. Most Hindi films dealing with male infertility or reproductive commerce would have reached for broad farce or weeping melodrama, but Sircar and writer Juhi Chaturvedi decided to treat the business of selling semen like a suburban Delhi hardware store operation. It is loose, slightly grubby, and entirely unbothered by the weighty social issues it’s dragging into the daylight. When we first meet Vicky, he is lounging around a Punjabi household that smells faintly of fried parathas and perpetual grievance, tossing cricket balls against a peeling wall with the total lack of urgency unique to twenty-something men who have never paid an electricity bill. Ayushmann Khurrana didn't walk into this role with the polished vanity of traditional leading men; he had that slightly slouchy, neighborhood-guy kinetic energy that made you feel like he might bum a cigarette off you outside a metro station before asking if you knew anyone hiring.

The screenplay moves through its high-concept premise with a strange, sideways rhythm that refuses to hit the expected beats on time. You get these long stretches of domestic bickering in cramped Lajpat Nagar rooms where the ceiling fans wobble menacingly, punctuated by Dr. Chaddha dragging Vicky down to his sterile fertility clinic like an eccentric uncle trying to rope a nephew into a pyramid scheme. Kapoor plays Chaddha with a manic desperation that avoids caricature mostly because he looks genuinely exhausted by his own entrepreneurial hustle, sweating through cheap synthetic shirts while pitching the miracle of high-motility sperm to distressed husbands. The camera by Kamaljeet Negi lingers on awkward medium shots in hallways, capturing the fluorescent flicker of clinic waiting rooms and the dusty amber haze of Delhi afternoons without turning the city into a postcard or a slum. There is a specific visual drabness to the interiors that anchors the absurdity, making the surreal premise of a prolific young donor feel weirdly plausible, like something you would read about in a regional newspaper's weird-news column.

Then Yami Gautam walks in and tilts the entire gravity of the movie. As Ashima, a Bengali banker with crisp cotton sarees and an eye-roll that could cut glass, she doesn't play the conventional sweet heroine who exists solely to validate the hero’s ego. She has this way of listening in conversations that suggests she is calculating your credit score while you are still mid-sentence, which makes her eventual fall for Vicky both inexplicable and entirely earned. The romance unspools through stolen moments over cold coffee and awkward text messages, giving them an actual chemistry that feels lived-in rather than manufactured in a recording studio. It’s a small thing, but the sound design during their early dates relies too heavily on a chirpy acoustic guitar loop that repeats every time they smile at each other, and by the third time it cues up, you just want to reach into the speakers and snip the strings. Aside from that minor audio annoyance, the interplay between the two leads carries the second hour even when the plot starts to wobble under the weight of its own deceit.

Dolly Ahluwalia anchors the domestic chaos as Vicky’s mother, running a small beauty parlor out of her living room while nursing a decades-old resentment toward absent men and bad whiskey. She doesn't raise her voice when she’s furious; she just drops her chin and keeps threading eyebrows with a clinical detachment that terrifies her son. The script lets her inhabit a space of complicated womanhood that Hindi cinema usually flattens into comforting maternal archetypes, giving her quiet moments of vulnerability where she drinks rum out of a coffee mug and watches old television serials alone in the dark. Juhi Chaturvedi’s dialogue avoids the punchline-heavy trap of modern screenwriting, letting characters talk over each other, drop half-finished thoughts, and misunderstand each other in the messy, circular way real families do when they are trapped together in small apartments.

The film uses its central conceit about fertility and parentage to poke gently at the absurd architecture of Indian middle-class respectability, where people will happily consume products funded by bizarre biological transactions while clutching their pearls at the mention of the word sperm. It invites comparison to Dibakar Banerjee’s Khosla Ka Ghosla in its affection for Delhi’s particular brand of opportunistic charm, though Sircar’s film is softer around the edges, more interested in the private compromises people make to keep the lights on and the relatives quiet. When the lie at the heart of Vicky and Ashima’s marriage finally detonates, the movie doesn't pivot into a grand courtroom drama or a tear-soaked railway station reconciliation, choosing instead to let the characters sit in their mutual mess and figure out how to forgive each other without a musical montage.

It gets a bit sentimental in the final reel, leaning into a moralizing speech about life and creation that feels slightly imported from a more conventional melodrama, but it recovers quickly enough by ending on a note of domestic compromise rather than transcendent joy. Khurrana manages to keep Vicky from becoming entirely unlikable even when he is lying through his teeth to a woman he claims to love, mostly because he always looks slightly confused by the consequences of his own actions. There is no grand wisdom imparted by the time the credits roll over a jaunty Punjabi folk track, just the lingering impression of a film that figured out how to talk about uncomfortable things in a living room full of gossiping aunties without ever losing its cool.