I still think about that scene where Champak Bansal tries to explain what a croissant is to a bunch of bewildered sweet-shop workers in Udaipur. It is a three-minute sequence that goes on just a beat too long, the kind of bit that would have hit the cutting room floor in a leaner picture, but director Homi Adajania lets it breathe until the comedy sours just enough into awkwardness. If I'm honest, that refusal to rush the gag is what makes the whole thing work, even when the script starts to wobble under its own weight.

Hindi movies have spent decades treating parental obsession as a grand, soaring emotional landscape where fathers are either stern demigods or martyrs of sacrifice. Here, the obsession is small, sweaty, desperate, and entirely ridiculous. Champak runs a modest sweet shop called Ghasite Ram Sweets, though his family has been feuding for generations over the exact trademark rights to that name, and his entire universe shrinks to the width of his teenage daughter Tarika's ambition to study in London. Radhika Madan plays Tarika with the kind of sullen, eye-rolling intensity that anyone who has ever been seventeen will recognize instantly. She doesn't perform rebellion as some grand cinematic statement; she performs it as a daily chore of annoyance with her excessively protective dad. When she wins a school debate that qualifies her for a university trip abroad, the plot kicks into gear with a clumsy sort of momentum that never quite smooths out its rough edges.

The screenplay feels patched together from three different drafts written by people who couldn't agree on tone, jumping wildly from broad domestic farce to frantic cat-and-mouse bureaucracy when the visa offices get involved. You can feel the struggle in the editing room, particularly in the middle stretch where London locations are introduced with the kind of generic tourist-board gloss that usually drains the oxygen out of otherwise grounded performances. Yet the movie keeps pulling itself back from the brink simply by anchoring its chaos to Irrfan Khan. Watching him work is like watching someone thread a needle while riding a bicycle on cobblestones; he finds humor in panic and dignity in sheer bewilderment. His Champak doesn't have grand monologues about the right to education or the dignity of the working class. He just shuffles through airport terminals with a gigantic suitcase full of sweets and a face that looks like it is about to negotiate peace in a war zone.

Kareena Kapoor Khan shows up as a London-based cop who is also Tarika's aunt, striding through frame after frame in impeccably tailored trench coats that somehow make her look entirely out of place in a movie about dusty sweet shops and cramped middle-class living rooms. It's a performance that relies almost entirely on attitude rather than depth, though she has a sharp throwaway line about dual-nationality logistics that almost justifies her screen time. The supporting cast does heavy lifting around her, especially Deepak Dobriyal as Champak's perpetually litigious cousin Gopi. Dobriyal plays pettiness with a kind of poetic devotion, treating a family court battle over mithai branding like it's the Treaty of Versailles. He and Irrfan have a rhythm together that recalls some of the best-observed buddy dynamics in recent Hindi cinema, tossing insults back and forth with the casual cruelty of people who have shared too many meals.

The cinematography by Sachin Kumar Krishnan manages to capture both the sun-baked, claustrophobic chaos of the old city lanes and the grey, antiseptic chill of London immigration queues without ever settling into a uniform visual grammar. That lack of slickness works to the film's advantage, keeping the focus locked onto faces that sweat and tear up without the benefit of flattering diffusion filters. It's a shame about the background score, which relies far too often on a generic acoustic guitar strum that feels like it was downloaded from a royalty-free library and pasted over every emotional transition just in case the audience forgot how to feel.

There is a specific kind of anxiety driving this narrative that feels distinct from the usual aspirational fluff found in mainstream Bollywood movies today, touching on the quiet terror of parents who realize their children are growing up into a world they cannot comprehend or protect them from. When Piku explored a different kind of frayed father-daughter bond, it did so with a chilly, sophisticated detachment that kept the viewer at arm's length. Angrezi Medium goes the other direction, throwing its characters into absurd, humiliating situations and watching them flail until they figure out how to say I love you without dying of embarrassment. It gets messy near the end, dragging out its moral about letting children go long after the point has been made with a sledgehammer, but the messiness is earned.

When the credits finally roll, you aren't thinking about the thematic weight of globalization or the intricacies of international student recruitment. You are thinking about the way Irrfan's shoulders drop when he realizes his daughter doesn't need him to fight her battles anymore, just needs him to stop embarrassing her in front of her friends. It is a small, quiet defeat, and the movie has the good sense not to turn it into a triumph.