Rajkummar Rao has a very specific way of holding a coffee cup that suggests he has never touched a warm liquid in his life, clutching it by the very rim like it’s a biological specimen he’d rather not contaminate. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me for the first twenty minutes of Namrata Singh Gujral’s 5 Weddings because his character Harbhajan Singh, a world-weary Delhi police officer assigned to babysit an American journalist, spends an ungodly amount of time in roadside tea stalls where nobody else holds their glassware with such surgical dread. That kind of disconnect sits right at the center of the film, a production that keeps one foot planted firmly in the hyper-polished fantasy version of India popularised by western television specials while the other stumbles through the messy reality of regional bureaucracy. To be fair, the movie never entirely hides its seams, dangling its premise about a cynical Los Angeles fashion writer sent to cover cultural nuptials right in front of us without bothering to invent a better excuse for why she is suddenly prying into the private lives of Hijras. Shania Singh, played by Nargis Fakhri with a flat-footed bewilderment that makes every line reading feel like she is translating it from an IKEA manual on the spot, needs a hook for her magazine piece and stumbles upon the traditional dancing communities whose customs provide the narrative spine. Or at least they would, if the script allowed the documentary angle to breathe instead of rushing toward the next choreographed entry in the mandatory wedding sequence.

Gujral directs with the sort of earnest determination that makes you want to grade on a steep curve, piling on drone shots of heritage sites and bustling markets with a heavy hand. Every exterior transition features the exact same sweeping overhead view of traffic circles that surely cost a fortune in licensing fees yet add precisely zero texture to the geography. Characters move between hotel lobbies, impoverished alleyways, and grand banquet halls with an elastic sense of space that ignores how cities actually function, cutting from a conversation in South Delhi to an event in old Punjab as if the two were separated by a single set of sliding doors. The screenplay, credited to Gujral alongside two other writers, lurches from tone to tone without pausing to catch its breath, sliding from broad romantic comedy banter into heavy-handed social commentary about transgender rights without any transitional grease to smooth the gears. It’s the kind of movie where someone will deliver a genuinely affecting monologue about marginalisation and ostracisation, and then the next scene will immediately feature a poorly dubbed background extra whose mouth keeps moving for a full second after the audio has stopped. You can feel the editorial room struggling to stitch together footage shot across different continents under varying lighting conditions, resulting in continuity errors so glaring they almost loop back around to being charming.

Fakhri spends most of her screen time looking intensely confused by the weather, the dialogue, and the various relatives who pop up to push the plot forward. When she smiles, it often arrives three beats too late for the joke, landing on her face like a delayed email attachment that finally downloaded after the conversation has already moved on. There is a total lack of chemistry between her and Rao, who plays his exhausted detective with such deadpan commitment that you keep waiting for him to break character and ask the director what on earth he is doing in this scene. Rao is better than the material deserves, finding small, human rhythms in lines that sound like they were pulled directly from an outdated travel brochure, but even his considerable charm cannot bridge the cavernous gap between his naturalistic screen presence and Fakhri’s deer-in-headlights model-off-duty routine. Then there is Bo Derek, who shows up in a series of flowing kaftans to play an editor whose primary narrative function is to bark vague deadlines over Skype while staring past the camera with the glazed expression of a woman who just realised her wire transfer cleared. Her scenes feel entirely divorced from the rest of the movie, shot on what looks like a single green-screen stage in Los Angeles where the lighting never quite matches the dusty warmth of the Indian locations.

Bollywood movies have long had a complicated relationship with the concept of the diaspora gaze, often exaggerating their own traditions for export while retaining local melodrama for domestic consumption. This film tries to straddle that exact line and falls squarely into the ditch between them, offering neither the delirious musical excess of vintage Hindi cinema nor the gritty observational texture of modern indie streaming projects. The wedding sequences themselves, which should anchor the entire experience, feel strangely hollow, drained of colour grading until the silk sarees and marigold garlands look muted and tired. A repeated musical cue—a generic string-heavy ballad that sounds remarkably like something you might hear on a royalty-free stock audio site during a dental office commercial—kicks in every time the narrative requires us to feel an emotion that the performances failed to generate. It plays so often that by the third wedding you start internally keeping score of how many seconds elapse between dialogue and the inevitable swell of violins. The cinematography favors aggressive lens flares and soft-focus close-ups that make everyone look as though Vaseline has been smeared directly across the camera lens, hiding the lack of production design behind a hazy digital fog.

The depiction of the Hijra community deserves credit for its central intent, bringing visibility to lives that commercial Hindi films historically relegated to background punchlines or grotesque caricatures. Yet the execution remains painfully clumsy, treating these characters less like actual people with agency and more like moral seasoning sprinkled across a bland romantic subplot to make the writer look socially conscious. We get speeches about human rights delivered with all the subtlety of a falling anvil, followed immediately by a comic relief bit involving a wedding planner losing his temper over a catering mix-up. That jarring pendulum swing between advocacy and farce prevents any real emotional weight from sticking, leaving the social message stranded in a narrative that treats its marginal characters as plot devices rather than human beings. If I am being honest, watching the film struggle with its own good intentions is far more fascinating than watching the central romance, which limps toward its inevitable conclusion with the energetic enthusiasm of an accountant finishing a quarterly report on a Friday afternoon. Neither the drama nor the comedy ever really lands with enough force to justify the runtime, leaving behind a weirdly hollow artifact that exists in a strange limbo between tourism board promotional video and melodramatic social drama.

There is no grand revelation to be found here, no hidden brilliance waiting to be uncovered by future generations of cinephiles who enjoy recovering forgotten cinematic misfires. It belongs to that peculiar class of international co-productions that exist primarily because the financing stars aligned on paper long before anyone figured out what the movie was actually supposed to say. Watching it feels less like experiencing a finished piece of art and more like attending a very long, slightly awkward dinner party where the hosts keep trying to convince you that everyone is having a wonderful time while the cake is clearly still frozen in the middle. Rao does what he can to salvage the wreckage with a few choice eye-rolls and exhausted sighs, but even his considerable talent gets swallowed up by the sheer momentum of a script that refuses to slow down long enough to make sense. We are left with an erratic, frequently baffling experiment that stumbles through its runtime without ever figuring out how to balance its competing ambitions. It sits there on the screen, not great, not bad, just taking up space until the credits finally roll and you can go make a cup of tea without holding it by the rim.