There is a specific kind of digital mist applied to the edges of the flashback sequences in Vikas Bahl’s Shaandaar that looks less like a creative choice and more like someone hit a slider too hard in post-production and simply walked away from the monitor, which is pretty much the energy governing the entire two-and-a-half-hour runtime. You sit there in the dark waiting for things to snap into focus, but the image stays slightly soft, the jokes hover just an inch above the floor instead of landing, and the whole enterprise feels like it was filmed inside a giant frosted glass jar where nobody can hear you sigh. It is supposed to be a sparkly, whimsical fairy tale about fat-shaming, insomnia, class divide, and royal weddings in some ridiculous Yorkshire castle, yet it plays out with the exhausted mechanical precision of a blender left running on empty.

Vikas Bahl came off the genuine warmth and messy charm of Queen with this one, and you can sense him trying to recreate that magic by tossing every quirky visual device he can think of onto the screen at once, from animated dream sequences to split-screen flashbacks and stop-motion interludes, as if sheer volume of directorial noise could disguise the hollow core of the screenplay. The narrative tracks Alia Arora, an insomniac orphan adopted into a deeply dysfunctional, snobbish Sindhi family where her grandfather Bipin and a tyrannical matriarch treat her like an unwanted guest until Jagjinder Joginder rolls in. Jagjinder, played by Shahid Kapoor with a ponytail and a permanent grin that looks like it hurts his jaw, is a wedding planner who doesn't believe in weddings, which is the kind of profound character contradiction that sounds much better in a pitch meeting than it does when you have to watch him leap over hedges for the fourth time in twenty minutes.

Alia Bhatt does what she can with a character whose defining trait is that she doesn't sleep and makes miniature art out of garbage, though the script constantly bogs her down with manic-pixie-dream-girl affectations that she already outgrew by the time she made Highway. She and Shahid have a breezy enough chemistry when they are allowed to just bounce off each other without a CGI bee flying between them, but the romance feels glued on with cheap tape. Then you have Pankaj Kapur and his real-life daughter Sanah Kapur playing father and daughter on screen, which should have been a masterclass in subtle familial tension if the writing hadn't reduced Sanah's character, Bela, entirely to the fact that she has heavy thighs and everyone around her is mean about it. Pankaj Kapur tries to bring an old-school gravitas to his role as the guilt-ridden adoptive father, barking his lines with a weary intensity that towers over the cotton-candy nonsense happening around him, though it mostly just makes you wish he was starring in a completely different movie. A better movie, maybe something resembling Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool where people actually meant the things they were shouting at each other.

Amit Trivedi provides the soundtrack, and while the songs are generally pleasant enough to hum along to while you check your phone, they arrive with the narrative urgency of a bus schedule, grinding the plot to a dead halt just so everyone can change into pastel costumes and dance in a courtyard. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how often the background score decides to tell us exactly how to feel about a character before they've even finished walking through a door, stripping away any possibility of genuine surprise. Anil Mehta’s cinematography tries its absolute hardest to make the Yorkshire estate look like a magical wonderland of fairy lights and mist, but the digital grading drains the color right out of the natural landscapes, leaving everything in shades of depressed teal and washed-out gray.

Hindi movies have a long and glorious history of extravagant destination weddings where families scream at each other across dinner tables and secrets spill out of wedding cakes, yet Shaandaar misses the chaotic joy that usually makes these things fun to watch, replacing that familial mess with an overly produced sheen that feels sterile and rehearsed. Even the supporting cast, featuring heavy hitters like Sushma Seth and Sanjay Kapoor chewing the scenery with gusto, can't rescue a plot that keeps getting bogged down in its own hyperactive attempts to be quirky, because quirkiness isn't a substitute for a functioning narrative arc. Bollywood movies thrive on melodrama, but this particular brand of high-concept whimsy just sits there on the plate, looking colorful and expensive, waiting for someone to care enough to take a bite.

We are left with a film that spent so much time worrying about whether its frames looked Pinterest-ready that it completely forgot to construct a compelling reason for anyone to stick around until the final credits, resulting in a viewing experience that washes over you without leaving a single wet spot. You forget whole chunks of it ten minutes after the screen goes black, which might actually be a mercy.