Ahan Shetty sounds like his throat is permanently lined with coarse gravel in "Tadap," which is either a bold artistic choice for an obsessed, obsessive protagonist or just the result of doing too many shouting scenes in a row without enough water breaks between takes. He plays Ishaan, a young man running an empire of illegal boat docks in Mussoorie with the kind of greasy-haired intensity that usually gets actors cast in south Indian remakes, which is precisely what this is, though the seams show more here than they did in "RX 100." The movie starts with a camera hovering too long over a set of wet windshield wipers before it even introduces the people, establishing a mood of dampness that persists for nearly three hours and makes you want to reach for a towel while sitting in the dark of the cinema. Milan Luthria directs with the subtlety of a freight train coming down a steep incline, relying on screeching tires and swelling brass sections whenever the two leads so much as look at each other across a crowded college canteen. Tara Sutaria plays Ramisa, the politician’s daughter who descends into Ishaan’s messy life with the crisp white shirts and straightened hair of someone who has never had to scrub grease off her knuckles, and their chemistry has the flat, forced quality of a brand partnership rather than a desperate, illicit romance. She looks great, certainly, but she possesses the emotional range of a very expensive piece of furniture placed deliberately in the middle of a burning room.

The script, credited to Rajat Arora, feels like it was written in 1998 and kept in a damp drawer until someone decided to blow the dust off and insert a few references to WhatsApp voice notes to make it feel current. Saurabh Shukla shows up as the surrogate father figure who dispenses folksy wisdom and gruff affection while smoking beedis in the corner of every other scene, and honestly, he looks bored out of his skull, collecting a paycheck for playing the exact same role he has sleepwalked through in half a dozen other Hindi films. The narrative structure relies entirely on a framing device involving a broken-down car and a cynical cop who listens to Ishaan’s tragic backstory with the pained expression of a man who just wants his lunch break, dragging us back into the past through endless flashbacks that repeat the exact same emotional beats until you start wishing someone would just cut the brakes on one of those speedboats. There is a relentless, exhausting volume to the whole enterprise where every single emotion must be screamed at the top of the lungs or underscored by a string section that refuses to let up, leaving zero oxygen for anything resembling a quiet moment between characters.

Let’s talk about the soundtrack because it’s the kind of thing that blares out of car windows in suburban neighborhoods at two in the morning, full of synthesized heartbreak and drums that hit your chest cavity with enough force to rearrange your internal organs. Pritam’s music is loud and inescapable, recycling the same five-note melody through four different tracks until you feel like you are being waterboarded with a love ballad, and the needle-drop for the main romantic montage happens not once, not twice, but four distinct times in the first hour alone, each time using the exact same chorus to cue a slow-motion shot of Tara Sutaria running through a pine forest. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me how the audio mix completely drops the ambient sound of the rain whenever the romantic dialogue starts, leaving the two actors speaking in a dead acoustic vacuum that makes them sound like they are recording a voiceover in a closet rather than standing in the middle of a monsoon.

Bollywood has spent the last decade trying to figure out how to update the angry young man archetype without making him look like an absolute psycho, and "Tadap" solves this problem by simply leaning into the psycho angle and hoping the audience will forgive the stalking and the casual violence because the boy has nice biceps and cries real tears when the girl ignores his phone calls. Ishaan isn't a complex character; he’s a collection of tics and brooding scowls that Ahan Shetty wears like an ill-fitting suit, occasionally dropping into a monologue about love and honor that sounds less like human speech and more like a collection of inspirational quotes scraped off the side of a delivery truck. The action sequences, staged by action directors who clearly watched "Kabir Singh" on a loop, involve a lot of slow-motion bone-cracking and villains flying backward through wooden tables as if they were made of balsa wood, contributing to a general sense of cartoonish hyper-reality that completely clashes with the supposedly grounded, small-town political backdrop.

Somewhere underneath the noise and the slow-motion hair flips, there is a movie about class resentment and the way old money uses young muscle to keep the wheels turning, but the film is far too interested in watching its lead actor tear his shirts off to actually examine any of that with a straight face. The supporting cast drifts in and out like ghosts, serving no real narrative purpose other than to look shocked whenever Ishaan does something reckless, which is roughly every seven minutes by my count. Tara Sutaria’s character makes decisions that defy both human logic and basic self-preservation, shifting from terrified hostage to bold rebel without any transitional scenes to explain the psychological whiplash, leaving the audience stranded in a narrative desert where motivations change according to whichever song needs to be shot next. It’s a long, damp, exhausting slog that mistakes volume for passion and repetition for depth, leaving you staring at the exit sign long before the credits finally decide to put you out of your misery.