The sound of anklets on marble floors gets grating by the third hour, if I'm being honest. Sanjay Leela Bhansali doesn't know how to turn down the reverb on grief, and the first twenty minutes of Devdas come at you like a freight train loaded with stained glass and red silk. You sit there in the dark while the credits burn into the retina, wondering if every single frame in this three-hour epic is going to be lit like a Renaissance painting that someone spilled cheap wine on. Shahrukh Khan is already weeping before the title card even drops, his voice cracking with that specific theatrical desperation that either makes you lean in or check your watch. It is based on a novella that everyone in Calcutta seems to have memorized by heart, though you wouldn't know it from the way the script treats the narrative spine like a suggestion rather than a map. The plot is simple enough to scribble on a napkin. Boy loves girl. Boy goes to London. Boy comes back. Family says no because of social standing, or maybe just out of pure stubborn spite, and then everyone spends the rest of the runtime drinking themselves into an early grave while surrounded by expensive props.

Bhansali directs every scene as if it's the final moment of the world, which leaves zero room for oxygen or quiet transitions. The camera swoops over courtyards that look suspiciously like soundstages with too much budget, capturing extras who are working overtime to look devastated in the background. It is an exhausting way to watch a movie, yet you keep looking because the sheer audacity of the visual excess demands attention. The sets are enormous. They dwarf the actors, turning human heartbreak into architectural spectacle. You get long tracking shots that follow Shahrukh down corridors of flickering candles, and while the lighting is undeniably gorgeous, it also feels entirely detached from any human reality. The screenplay by Bhansali and Prakash Kapadia takes Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s classic text and stretches it until the joints snap. Characters state their emotional states out loud with the subtlety of a falling piano. Subtlety was clearly banned from the production office on day one. Even the minor exchanges between servants carry the weight of operatic tragedy. It’s a Bollywood movie that refuses to let you catch your breath, plunging from one emotional crisis into another without a pause for a cup of tea.

Shahrukh Khan plays the titular loser with a sort of feral intensity that occasionally tips over into pure noise. His eyes stay bloodshot for ninety percent of the film, and he delivers lines about pain and ruin as if he's auditioning to play King Lear in a hurricane. There's an unhinged quality to his performance that saves it from being just another romantic hero routine, especially in the sequences where he starts lashing out at anyone within arm's reach. He and Madhuri Dixit share a screen presence that crackles with genuine electricity, far more convincing than the doomed, puppy-dog romance he shares with Aishwarya Rai. Rai looks magnificent, of course, caught in soft-focus filters that make her skin look like porcelain, but her Paro often feels like a collection of poses rather than a living person. She stands on balconies, she lets her hair blow in the wind, she cries single, perfect tears that trace a clean path down her cheek. Madhuri, on the other hand, digs her heels into the floorboards as Chandramukhi. Her introductory dance sequence is a marvel of footwork and camera choreography, though I could have done without the slightly dubbed-sounding vocal trills that don't quite match her mouth movements in the close-ups. It's a small thing, but it bugged me every time the audio slipped by half a frame during her musical numbers.

The music department went entirely overboard, and that is meant as both a compliment and a complaint. Ismail Darbar and Monty Sharma packed the soundtrack with orchestral arrangements that sound like they were recorded inside a cathedral made of brass. Songs stretch across ten minutes of screen time, featuring hundreds of background dancers executing synchronized steps while the principals trade longing glances across courtyards the size of football fields. Bimar Dil keeps playing as a motif so often that you start humming it involuntarily when you go to the kitchen for water. It embeds itself in your head like a catchy parasite. Bin Royeheen gives Aishwarya a chance to emote in silence, which she handles better than when she has to deliver the melodramatic dialogue about destiny and class divides. The cinematography by Binod Pradhan relies heavily on deep reds and bruised blues, painting every sunset as a catastrophe and every night as a furnace. You are constantly aware of the frame, of the deliberate placement of every drapery and flower petal. It isn't naturalism; it's a fever dream cooked up by someone who spent too much time looking at Mughal miniatures and decided reality simply wasn't colorful enough. Hindi cinema has given us plenty of grand tragedies over the decades, but few have tried to drown the audience in visual velvet quite like this one.

Underneath the gloss, the film deals with the rigid class structures of early twentieth-century Bengal, though it treats them more as decorative backdrops than actual systems of oppression. Devdas cannot marry Paro because of family honor, but the movie is less interested in critiquing the feudal mindset than it is in using that mindset as an excuse for three hours of suffering. It shares DNA with Guru Dutt's Pydasa in its depiction of the self-destructive artist or romantic, but lacks the raw, aching honesty that made Dutt's work feel lived-in and dangerous. Devdas doesn't feel dangerous. He feels like an expensive accessory to his own ruin. He drinks himself to death because he's weak, yet the film insists on treating his slow suicide as the ultimate expression of true love. That logic is hard to swallow, especially when you watch Paro waste her life locked away in a fortress with an old, cold husband who treats her like a prized piece of furniture. The women in the story emerge as far more resilient than the man they supposedly pine for, which creates a fascinating tension that the script never quite resolves. Chandramukhi's unconditional devotion to a man who barely remembers her name borders on pathology, yet Madhuri plays it with such grounded dignity that you almost forget how absurd the premise is. These themes of sacrifice and societal suffocation echo through many major Hindi films, but here they are dressed up in so much gold leaf that the social commentary practically suffocates under the weight of the production design.

By the time Devdas drags his battered body to the gates of Paro's mansion in the final reel, the film has exhausted every trick in its visual arsenal. The snow falling on the iron gates during the climax looks suspiciously like shredded paper tossed from a crane, but by then you've surrendered to the artifice of the whole enterprise. It is too long, too loud, and far too pleased with its own misery. Yet it lingers in the memory long after leaner, smarter pictures have faded away, mostly because Bhansali commits to his maximalist vision with a terrifying level of sincerity. You leave the theater feeling like you've eaten an entire wedding cake by yourself, sick to your stomach on sugar and butter, wondering why you enjoyed it so much even as you reach for an aspirin.