There is a specific kind of sound a gin and tonic makes when it is poured over dense, commercial ice in a dim London bar that director Nitin Kakkar seems determined to reproduce through sheer auditory force in the opening twenty minutes of his third feature, a breezy mid-budget comedy about aging vanity and unplanned parenthood that coasts on the residual charm of Saif Ali Khan playing a slightly older, considerably greyer variant of the exact same commitment-phobic Londoner he played in Cocktail nearly a decade ago, though this time with better knitwear and a chronic case of lower back pain that periodically interrupts his salsa dancing with women half his age. If I'm honest, the first twenty minutes feel like watching a man try to stretch a pair of designer jeans that shrunk in the hot wash, desperately pulling at the seams while hoping nobody notices the frayed threads around the zipper. You get the sense that the script by Hussain Dalal and Abbas Dalal wanted to be something sharper, something closer to a Noah Baumbach observation about urban arrested development, but the machinery of commercial Hindi movies keeps dragging it back toward predictable family reconciliations and loud emotional outbursts in airport terminals.

Khan plays Jaswinder Singh, universally known as Jaz, a real estate broker who lives in a bachelor pad so aggressively minimalist it looks like a furniture showroom inside a converted warehouse, complete with exposed brick walls that never seem to accumulate dust and a vinyl collection that gets used strictly for background atmosphere during trysts with interchangeable dates he meets at wine tastings. He does not want a wife. He does not want a dog. He definitely does not want a teenager showing up at his doorstep claiming to be his long-lost daughter from a forgotten fling in the nineties, which is precisely what happens when Alaya Furniturewala, making her debut as the fiercely independent Tia, bounces into his life with a pregnant belly, a bohemian boyfriend, and a cool detachment that completely disarms his well-practiced routine of emotional avoidance. Furniturewala has a loose, modern screen presence that does not smell of acting classes or obsessive rehearsal schedules, carrying herself with an easy confidence that makes her scenes with Khan genuinely watchable even when the dialogue sags under the weight of forced slang. She refuses to play the wide-eyed ingenue, bringing a sharp, almost cynical pragmatism to the role of a girl who just wants to sort out her chaotic family tree before she has her own kid, and that refusal to lean into standard melodramatic tropes saves several early scenes that threaten to curdle into sentimentality.

Tabu shows up roughly forty minutes in as Ananya, Tia’s mother and Jaz’s former flame, and the film instantly shifts gears from a moderately amusing mid-life crisis farce into something much richer and funnier, purely because Tabu possesses the rare ability to make exposition sound like private gossip overheard in a grocery store queue. She wears oversized sunglasses indoors, chain-smokes menthols with an air of mild exhaustion, and looks at Khan with a mix of fond exasperation and ancient irritation that suggests their past relationship involved a lot of arguments about whose turn it was to pay the electricity bill. When the three of them end up sharing a cramped London apartment because of some convoluted narrative contrivance involving visa issues and parental bonding, the physical comedy works because the actors look like they actually inhabit the space rather than just hitting their marks on a soundstage. There is a small thing that bugged me, though, and it has nothing to do with the thematic weight of the narrative: the sound editor uses the exact same muffled street-traffic hum during every single interior day scene, regardless of whether the flat is supposed to be on a quiet residential side-street or right above a bustling tube station. It is a tiny technical slip that pulls you right out of the illusion of London, reminding you that you are watching a set built on a lot somewhere outside Mumbai.

Nitish Kumar’s cinematography relies heavily on a bruised twilight palette, bathing the London exteriors in muddy blues and bruised oranges that make the city look less like a postcard and more like a damp grey sweater you forgot to dry properly, while the interior frames stay tight, focusing on the cluttered surfaces of Jaz’s vanity table and the half-empty wine bottles that litter his kitchen counter. The soundtrack leans hard on remixed vintage tracks, dragging out old Bollywood hits and dressing them up in slick electronic basslines that sound great through theater subwoofers while doing absolutely nothing to advance the emotional geography of the scenes they accompany. Yet the film finds its rhythm not in the musical numbers, which feel tacked on to satisfy traditional distribution demands, but in the quiet, conversational friction between the three leads as they figure out how to be a family without any of the legal paperwork or societal blueprints usually required for the job. Khan handles the transition from selfish hedonist to reluctant patriarch with a weary grace that feels earned, particularly in scenes where he has to look at his reflection in a bathroom mirror and realize that his hair dye is no longer fooling anyone.

There is an interesting tension at the heart of the screenplay regarding how modern romantic comedy tropes collide with traditional Indian family values, though the film is generally too polite to push that conflict to its logical breaking point, preferring instead to wrap everything up in a neat narrative bow involving joint custody and mutual respect over brunch. It refuses to judge Jaz for wanting to sleep alone or for panicking when he has to buy diapers for a grandchild before he has even gotten used to the idea of being a father, maintaining a light, non-judgmental tone that keeps the proceedings from feeling heavy-handed even when the plot mechanics get creaky. That lightness is both its primary strength and its greatest limitation, preventing it from achieving the lasting cultural resonance of earlier hits like Dil Chahta Hai while still making it far superior to the majority of recent romantic comedies churned out by the mainstream studio system. It ends not with a grand speech about the sanctity of blood ties or the importance of forgiveness, but with a quiet, slightly awkward conversation in a kitchen over cold toast, which feels about right for a story that spends most of its runtime trying to figure out how to grow up without losing your sense of humor.