There is a specific sound a champagne flute makes when it is placed too hard on a glass-topped coffee table in a modern Mumbai penthouse, and it is a sound the sound designer of Ek Paheli Leela relies on with alarming frequency. If I'm honest, that little audio sting bothered me more than most of the plot holes because once you hear it, the movie uses it every single time a wealthy character gets annoyed, which turns out to be roughly every four minutes. It is a small thing, but it bugged me, dragging my attention away from the staggering amount of turquoise silk on screen and right back into the foley booth where someone was probably just tapping a butter knife against a water glass and pitching it down. Bollywood movies have always loved an expensive smash cut, though, so maybe I am just being petty about glassware.

Bobby Khan directs this reincarnation drama with the delicate touch of a freight train rolling through a crowded marketplace, crashing through three distinct lifetimes without ever slowing down to check if the audience survived the impact. He spent years choreographing music videos before taking the director's chair here, and that background bleeds into every single frame, making the narrative feel less like a connected story and more like a twelve-hour dance album where the plot only exists to justify why everyone is currently standing in a desert wearing very little clothing. The screenplay, which he also wrote, reads like something pulled from the bottom drawer of a 1990s VHS rental shop after a flood, full of ancient curses, suspicious brothers, and royal painting studios where nobody ever actually paints. Rajneesh Duggal plays a photographer with the haunted, glazed-over expression of a man who left his oven on back in Bandra, while Rahul Dev growls his way through a supporting role that required him to wear leather jackets in forty-degree heat with no narrative justification whatsoever. The camera swoops and swirls around them like an over-caffeinated drone, desperate to keep things moving because standing still for even five seconds would mean confronting the absolute void at the center of the scene.

Sunny Leone takes on the heavy lifting here, carrying dual roles across centuries as if she were starring in her own version of The Double Life of Veronique, except directed by someone who only knows about French art house cinema from Wikipedia summaries. She is remarkably stiff during the dramatic dialogue exchanges, reciting Hindi lines with the careful, phonetic precision of a tourist ordering a dosa, but the moment the music swells she hits a completely different gear and owns the frame with a kind of blank, mesmerizing confidence. Her transition from a modern supermodel in London to a tragic Rajasthani princess is handled entirely through wardrobe changes and lighting shifts, leaving her to bridge the massive psychological gap with just a pout or a dramatic toss of her hair. Jay Bhanushali shows up as a rockstar who falls in love with her billboard, which gives you some idea of the sophisticated psychological depths the script refuses to explore, and he spends most of his screen time looking like he just won a contest to appear in a feature film and is terrified someone is going to ask for his autograph before the director yells cut.

The cinematography relies heavily on a saturated, sun-bleached filter that makes Rajasthan look like a perfume commercial financed by a real estate developer, while the soundtrack does the heavy lifting that the dialogue abandoned halfway through the second reel. Songs thunder out of nowhere without any regard for continuity, turning dramatic confrontations into impromptu music videos where backup dancers materialize out of thin air behind the lead actors like synchronized ninjas. Mohit Ahlawat looms in the background as a jealous husband with a mustache that deserves its own billing, glaring into the middle distance while electronic sitars wail on the soundtrack. It's a messy, loud, incoherent sort of filmmaking that occasionally hits upon an accidental surrealism, especially during the reincarnation flashbacks where people wear wigs that clearly cost less than the catering budget for the junior artists.

Beneath the endless parade of designer lehengas and desert sunrises, the movie attempts to unpack notions of female agency through the lens of ancient sin and modern redemption, but the ideas trip over themselves before they can make a point. The women in these stories are constantly being punished for loving the wrong man or painting the wrong portrait, yet the punishment always looks suspiciously like a five-minute music video shot at golden hour in a five-star resort. Hindi films have flirted with the supernatural and past-life regression for decades, but rarely with this level of literal-minded confusion where a cursed painting functions basically as a time-share in hell. Jas Arora plays a slimy villain who pops up in both the past and present timelines, proving that bad tailoring and worse intentions are truly immortal, and his scenes with Leone provide a strange, sluggish friction that never quite ignites into actual drama.

There is no grand revelation waiting at the end of this journey, just a final musical number that recaps the entire plot using choreography that looks suspiciously similar to the opening number, and then the screen simply goes black without any kind of thematic grace note. You are left sitting in the dark wondering why anyone involved thought a rockstar falling for a dead princess's reincarnation needed two and a half hours to sort itself out, and why the sound of that champagne glass kept echoing in your head long after the credits stopped rolling.