Shahid Kapoor makes a weird little clicking sound with the back of his teeth during the 1960 storyline of Kunal Kohli’s Teri Meri Kahaani that I cannot get out of my head. It happens right before he delivers his punchlines to Priyanka Chopra in the Bombay segment, a tiny acting tic that feels completely unscripted and sort of annoying, yet it stays with you long after the grand emotional arcs of the picture have dissolved into the ether of forgotten matinee idols and mid-tier box office returns. Movies like this arrive with a certain baggage, mostly because Hindi cinema has spent decades trying to perfect the multiple-lifetime romance without realizing that one well-written afternoon is usually worth more than three centuries of recycled costume drama. The director here wants to prove that love transcends time, but he spends so much of the runtime figuring out period-accurate hair gel that the metaphysical weight of the premise sort of gets lost in the dressing room. We are dropped into 1910 first, then bounced forward to 1960, and finally dumped into 2012 London, a geographical and temporal tri-fecta that tests the audience's patience before the popcorn has even gone cold in the cup holder. It is a structure that demands absolute commitment from the two leads, which is fine, because Shahid and Priyanka have enough natural electricity between them to power a small suburb, even when the dialogue sounds like it was scraped off the back of a greeting card purchased at a railway station kiosk.

The 1910 Punjab segment has this amber-tinted glow that makes every single grain of wheat look like it cost a million dollars, courtesy of a cinematography team that clearly watched a lot of period epics right before stepping onto the soundstage. You get these endless tracking shots of horses running past dusty backdrops while the background score swells with aggressive enthusiasm, telling you precisely how to feel every single second of the narrative. Kunal Kohli directs with the sort of heavy-handed earnestness that worked wonders a decade prior in Hum Tum, but here it feels slightly out of touch, like an uncle who still tries to use slang he heard on television three years ago. The script lurches between forced slapstick and melodramatic weeping with zero gear changes, meaning you go from watching Shahid play a clumsy village lout to seeing him stare into the middle distance with tears pooling in his lower eyelashes without any logical transition. It is the sort of filmmaking where characters announce their internal emotional states out loud to empty rooms, just in case the people sitting in the back row of the single-screen theater in Indore happened to be unwrapping a packet of chips during the crucial monologue. There is an editing choice in the middle of a confrontation scene in the 1960s where the camera lingers on Priyanka’s reaction shot for four full beats too long, long enough for you to notice the slight twitch in her eyebrow and wonder if she was thinking about what to have for dinner after wrap.

When the movie finally drags itself into modern-day England, the visual palette shifts to that slick, over-lit aesthetic common to a lot of overseas romances from that era, where every London street corner looks like it was power-washed five minutes before the cameras rolled. Prachi Desai and Neha Sharma pop up in supporting slots to provide narrative friction for the leads, though their characters exist solely to propel the plot from one song sequence to the next without developing anything resembling a pulse. Neha Sharma has this one specific expression of mild annoyance that she deploys whenever Shahid talks to another woman, and honestly, fair enough, because the protagonist in this contemporary segment is an insufferable music producer who deserves to be ignored for at least three consecutive working weeks. The soundtrack, composed by Sajid-Wajid, relies heavily on tracks that sound like rejected demos from Partner, hammering the same percussive loop into your skull until you start twitching in rhythm. It’s a loud, brassy score that doesn't know how to whisper, preferring instead to assault the audience with acoustic guitars every time two characters share a meaningful glance across a cluttered coffee shop table.

Priyanka Chopra does some heavy lifting across all three eras, managing to make three distinct women feel like actual human beings despite the script throwing every conceivable cliché from the history of hindi cinema directly at her head. In 1910 she is fierce and sharp-tongued, in 1960 she is a bubbly aspiring playback singer who loves Rajesh Khanna films a bit too much for a character set in 1960, and in 2012 she is a stressed-out coordinator running around British university quadrangles with a clipboard. She handles the tonal shifts better than her co-star, who tends to default to a frantic, arm-waving version of charm whenever the scene starts to sag under its own weight. There is a genuine chemistry there, reminiscent of what they achieved together in Kaminey, though stripped of Vishal Bhardwaj's grit and replaced with the glossy, airbrushed polish of a shampoo commercial that refuses to end. You can see them trying to find real moments of friction in scenes that have been written down to the lowest common denominator, pushing against the dialogue like actors trapped in a runaway elevator.

The philosophical underpinnings of the piece are basically just fortune-cookie nonsense dressed up in ethnic wear and leather jackets, suggesting that souls find each other across the cosmos because of some pre-ordained celestial accounting system. It is a comforting thought, certainly, but it avoids any actual messy emotional work by letting reincarnation do the heavy lifting that character development should be handling. If a relationship falls apart in one lifetime, no worries at all, just wait fifty years and try again with a better haircut and a slightly more expensive sports car. This approach drains the drama of any real stakes, because death or betrayal in the past life carries zero weight when you know the characters are just going to pop up in hipster glasses two reels later sipping lattes in Soho. Bollywood movies have always had a complicated relationship with fate, but usually they anchor that fatalism in social reality rather than treating it like a cosmic travel agency.

Watching this thing now, away from the marketing hype and the pre-release interviews where everyone promised a fresh take on eternal romance, feels like uncovering an old fashion magazine in a dentist's waiting room. It is not great, not bad, just there, existing in that massive gray middle of mediocre hindi films that populate satellite television on lazy Sunday afternoons when nobody can be bothered to reach for the remote control. The supporting cast members have these clearly dubbed lines where the audio sync is off by a fraction of a second, a small technical glitch that pulls you out of the illusion just enough to remember you are looking at a projection in a darkened box. That background extra in the 1960 restaurant scene who keeps eating the same piece of naan for four consecutive camera angles deserves hazard pay for sheer persistence. There is no grand conclusion to be drawn here about the state of the romantic drama or the evolution of star personas, mostly because the film doesn't leave enough of a footprint to warrant an archaeological dig. It simply runs its course, hits every required emotional marker with the precision of a metronome, and then cuts to black while a cheerful pop remix plays over the credits, leaving you to wonder what you were doing with your life for the past two hours.