Ayushmann Khurrana has made a whole career out of playing men who are falling apart in very specific, highly embarrassing ways that make half the audience in the multiplex cross their arms and check their text messages. Right off the bat in Bala, directed with a sort of frantic, sweaty energy by Amar Kaushik, Khurrana does this thing with his shoulders where they're constantly hitched up toward his ears like he's bracing for someone to slap him in the back of the head. It is a physical choice that tells you everything about the guy before he even opens his mouth to deliver his stupid, rehearsed Shah Rukh Khan impersonation at a local Kanpur college event that nobody is actually paying attention to.

Kanpur in this movie looks and feels like it smells faintly of fried oil and open drains, which is a nice change from the aggressively sanitised middle-India towns that usually populate commercial Hindi films these days. Anuj Rakesh Dhawan’s camera moves with a jerky, restless curiosity, rarely settling down for a master shot when it can instead peer over someone’s shoulder at a receding hairline under fluorescent strip lighting. The soundtrack has these jagged little folk guitar stings that occasionally cut off mid-chord, which I actually found kind of annoying after the fourth time it happened, but it keeps the rhythm from getting too comfortable.

The screenplay by Niren Bhatt has a bad habit of treating every scene like it needs to land a punchline or a social message, sometimes within the exact same breath. Bala loses most of its hair before he turns thirty, and the panic that sets in is genuinely pathetic in a way that feels earned, even if the supporting characters are mostly just walking billboards for body positivity. Saurabh Shukla shows up as a local dermatologist who dispenses quack remedies with the stern confidence of a man who has never once questioned his own medical degree, and every single moment he shares with Khurrana crackles with a kind of desperate, sad-sack comedy that doesn't need to underline its own themes.

There's a scene midway through where Bala tries to glue a toupee to his scalp using something that looks suspiciously like Feviquick, and Khurrana plays the physical humiliation of it without leaning into the usual Bollywood movies safety net of self-deprecation that makes these characters instantly lovable again. He’s vain, he’s small-minded, and when he starts mocking his dark-skinned childhood friend Latika, played with a wonderful, unbothered dryness by Bhumi Pednekar, you actually dislike him. Pednekar is doing heavy lifting here beneath some genuinely baffling skin-darkening makeup that distracts from her performance every time the camera gets too close, a choice that feels entirely unnecessary given her actual acting chops.

Speaking of things that bugged me, there is this one reaction shot of a background dancer in a local fashion show sequence that lingers for at least two seconds too long, long enough for you to notice she has absolutely no idea what song is playing. It’s a small thing, sure, but it points to a certain sloppiness in the editing suite that pops up whenever the narrative tries to transition from the comedy tracks into the heavy emotional stuff about societal standards of beauty. Yami Gautam enters the picture as a TikTok-famous model named Pari, and she plays the part with this terrifying, wide-eyed influencer vacancy that reminds you of how well she can handle broad satire when the script actually gives her room to breathe.

Amar Kaushik previously directed Stree, which balanced its horror-comedy elements with a bit more structural discipline than what's on display here. Bala wants to be a satirical fable about the tyranny of physical appearance, but it keeps tripping over its own moral imperatives, suddenly stopping the funny bits to deliver a very loud, very obvious speech about loving yourself from the inside out. It’s the kind of storytelling compromise that plagues so many modern Hindi movies, where the studio apparently gets terrified that the audience won't get the point unless a character literally turns to the camera and explains the thesis statement over a swelling instrumental track.

Despite all that narrative hand-holding, the chemistry between Khurrana and his screen mother, played with weary, eye-rolling perfection by Seema Pahwa, grounds the whole enterprise in something recognisable and messy. They don't have sweeping heart-to-heart conversations about hair loss or societal pressure; they just yell at each other over the sound of a pressure cooker whistling in a cramped kitchen, and those moments carry more truth than any of the big courtroom-style climaxes the genre loves to fall back on. When Bala finally stops wearing the rug and walks out into the sunlight with his bald pate gleaming under the Kanpur smog, it isn't some triumphant cinematic liberation, but rather just a guy accepting that he has to live his life with a cold head.

The film ends on a somewhat messy musical note that tries to tie up the loose ends of both romance and self-acceptance in about four minutes flat, rushing through developments that really needed another half-hour to breathe properly. Yami Gautam’s character gets sidelined into a punchline about superficiality that feels a bit cheap after the movie spent so much time establishing her as more than just a pretty face with a ring light. Still, watching Khurrana sweat his way through a public humiliation while trying to maintain some shred of his inflated ego is enough to keep the machinery moving.