There is a specific kind of side-eye that happens in the editing room when a director realizes the first act is three minutes too long and decides to fix it with a hard dissolve instead of a trim. Yeh Saali Aashiqui starts with that exact kind of clumsy punctuation and never quite finds a rhythm that feels earned. If I'm honest, the whole opening twenty minutes play out like an extended prologue that was salvaged from a completely different genre exercise entirely. We are dropped into a college campus where Sahil and Mitee are circling each other with the sort of intense, hyper-articulate banter that only exists in the heads of screenwriters who peaked during the late 90s. Vardhan Puri plays Sahil with a permanent squint that’s supposed to read as obsessive passion but often just looks like he's trying to remember where he parked his car. He is Amrish Puri's grandson, a fact that the marketing department tried to keep under wraps for about five minutes before leaning on it entirely. You spend the early scenes looking for genetic echoes in the jawline instead of listening to what he is actually saying. Shivaleeka Oberoi as Mitee enters the frame with a wide, unblinking smile that immediately puts you on edge. She has this way of laughing that doesn't quite reach her eyes, which is effective at first because you know something has to go wrong, but then she keeps doing it scene after scene until it just feels like an acting tick.

Cherag Ruparel takes the director's chair and approaches the material with the kind of blunt-force trauma you usually associate with direct-to-video thrillers from the mid-2000s. He wants to subvert the standard boy-meets-girl template of Hindi movies, but he confuses subversion with just making everyone profoundly unpleasant to be around. Every conversation between the leads feels like a verbal deposition. The screenplay, credited to Amrish Kumar and Vardhan Puri himself, keeps introducing twists that are telegraphed so far in advance you can practically hear the crew setting them up behind the camera. A plot point involving a stolen laptop and a fake identity feels lifted directly from a standard episode of Crime Patrol, stretched out across ninety minutes without enough narrative meat to justify the duration. The supporting cast, particularly Jessey Lever as the obligatory best friend who exists only to dispense dubious advice and absorb exposition, delivers lines with the dead-eyed stiffness of someone reading subtitles off a monitor just off-screen. It's a small thing, but there is this recurring background extra in the college canteen scenes who is reading the exact same magazine upside down across three different sequences shot on different days. Once you spot it, you can't look at anything else in the frame.

The cinematography by Amalendu Chaudhary tries very hard to turn ordinary suburban Mumbai locations into neo-noir hellscapes through sheer force of color grading. Everything is either cast in a bruised, midnight-blue shadow or bathed in an aggressive, neon-magenta glare that makes the actors look like they are standing inside an overheating neon sign. It’s a visual strategy that works in short bursts during music videos, but over the course of a two-hour thriller, it induces a mild migraine. Speaking of the music, the soundtrack by Hitesh Modak leans heavily on acoustic guitar loops that keep repeating during the emotional high points. You hear the same four-note progression every single time a character has a revelation about their partner's fidelity. It’s an auditory crutch that robs the dramatic turns of any genuine surprise. When compared to something like Ek Hasina Thi, which managed to make its central game of cat-and-mouse feel genuinely dangerous through restraint and pacing, this film constantly overplays its hand with blaring strings and frantic jump cuts.

Beneath the mediocre thriller mechanics, the film is actively trying to say something about modern dating culture, where social media footprints and digital receipts have turned romance into a forensic science. Sahil and Mitee weaponize each other's pasts with terrifying efficiency. They treat love like a hostage negotiation where the currency is past text messages and deleted browser histories. The problem is that the script has zero empathy for either of them. They are not tragic figures trapped in a toxic dynamic; they are simply insufferable people doing bad things to each other in poorly lit rooms. When the narrative shifts gears into a full-blown revenge drama in the second half, the tone becomes so jarringly mean-spirited that any remaining goodwill evaporates. You stop caring about who wins the psychological warfare and start checking your watch to see when the credits are scheduled to drop.

Hindi films have a long and storied history of subverting the romantic hero archetype, stretching all the way back to Anjaam and beyond, but those stories understood that the villain needed a seductive charisma to pull the audience into the darkness. Here, both characters are so gratingly self-obsessed that watching them tear each other apart feels less like a thrilling descent into madness and more like sitting next to a couple having a loud, petty argument about split rent on a commuter train. Jessey Lever pops up occasionally to look concerned, but even his character's arc just peters out into a series of unresolved phone calls and empty shrugs. There is no grand thematic payoff here, no lingering psychological insight into the nature of modern obsession, just a collection of nasty scenes stitched together with aggressive editing and loud needle-drops that refuse to let the audience sit with their own thoughts for even a single second.