Jhataleka Malhotra wears this one particular green coat in the second half of Tuesdays and Fridays that looks heavy enough to trap small animals in its pockets, and I kept waiting for someone in the frame to acknowledge just how humid Mumbai actually gets in November. It is a small thing, but it bugged me, the way costume departments in these glossy modern romantic comedies seem to pull their lookbooks directly from an upscale Scandinavian airport terminal while the characters are supposedly sweating through a dinner date in Bandra. You spend half your time watching the movie wondering if the indoor climate control on these soundstages is set to absolute zero rather than listening to what the people are saying, which is a problem when the entire enterprise rests on a premise that requires your absolute, uncritical investment in the emotional friction between two very pretty people who talk in paragraphs.

Director Taranveer Singh attempts to dust off the high-concept rom-com by slapping a contract onto the proceedings, as if Dil Chahta Hai had been filtered through a junior copywriter's fever dream about modern urban detachment. The conceit is that Varun and Sia, played respectively by Anmol Dhillon and Jhataleka Malhotra, agree to date only on Tuesdays and Fridays to avoid the suffocating inevitability of standard domestic entanglement. They present this arrangement to their friends and bewildered therapists like it's a groundbreaking startup pitch, complete with spreadsheets and bound agreements that look like they were printed on heavy cardstock at a local Kinko's. Singh directs the early scenes with a brisk, commercial gloss that recalls the bright, airless aesthetic of Dharma Productions' mid-tier output, leaning heavily on drone shots of marine drive at dusk and apartments that feature exposed brick walls that make zero architectural sense for the rental market. The pacing in these initial sequences bops along on a breezy, synthetic energy, though the screenplay keeps tripping over its own cleverness by giving the leads dialogue that sounds like it was workshopped by a focus group of emotionally stunted marketing majors who read too many quotes from Tumblr.

Anmol Dhillon has this habit of dropping his chin toward his sternum whenever he delivers a line that is supposed to convey wounded sincerity, which becomes a tick you start counting around the forty-minute mark. He looks the part, certainly, moving through these pristine office spaces and velvet-draped restaurants with the casual, inherited ease of someone who grew up knowing exactly which fork to use. There's a stiffness to his comic timing, however, a reluctance to look entirely foolish that keeps him from selling the more absurd beats of the script. Jhataleka Malhotra fares somewhat better simply because she has sharper edges, cutting through the preciousness of the setup with a delivery that occasionally feels like it belongs in an entirely different, much meaner movie. When she has to cry, she doesn't do the glamorous single tear sliding down the cheek routine favored by generations of Hindi cinema heroines, she just gets red-faced and blotchy, which grounds the proceedings just enough to keep you from checking your watch.

Niki Walia pops up as the obligatory wise, slightly exasperated therapist, and she plays her handful of scenes with a weary professionalism that suggests she knew the script was thin long before the first draft was locked. The supporting cast otherwise drifts through the background like animated cardboard cutouts meant to populate a cocktail party scene, speaking in those perfectly clipped accents that belong to people who went to boarding schools in Dehradun and never quite recovered. The soundtrack by Tony Kakkar and Anupama Raag hits you over the head with generic club thumps and mid-tempo acoustic numbers that blur together until you can't tell if you're listening to the climax of this picture or a commercial for deodorant. The mixing on the dialogue feels muddy in the louder venues, forcing you to rely on subtitles even when the actors are speaking standard English, which makes you wonder if anyone actually listened to the finished stems before packing the hard drive off to the theater. Cinematographer Sameer Arya frames every single interior like it's an advertisement for modular kitchens, washing the shadows out with so much bright, even fill light that even the emotional breakdowns look like they were shot for a home decor catalog.

The script wants to wrestle with commitment phobia and the death of romance in the age of dating apps, but it treats these modern anxieties with the depth of a Pinterest board. Characters toss around terms like emotional availability and baggage as if they were reading from a self-help pamphlet left in a dentist's waiting room. When the mandatory third-act misunderstanding arrives—and it arrives on schedule, right down to the rainy night cab ride and the missed phone call—you feel a profound, bone-deep exhaustion settle into your joints. Bollywood movies have been running this exact same route since the nineties, trading the joint family melodrama for urban alienation without ever figuring out how to make the alienation feel real instead of just convenient. There is an entire sub-genre of Hindi films dedicated to attractive urbanites complaining about their spacious apartments while drinking craft beer, and Tuesdays and Fridays sits comfortably in the middle of that pile, neither offensive enough to hate nor sharp enough to remember by breakfast.

By the time the lead actors are making their tearful confessions at a destination wedding that looks like a wedding planner's fever dream, the sheer predictability of the machinery has worn you down to a nub. Dhillon and Malhotra try their level best to inject some genuine pulse into the climax, but they are fighting against a tide of beige interiors and dialogue that sounds like a translation of a French art-house film nobody asked for. It's not a disaster, exactly, just a very long, very loud demonstration of how much money you can spend to say absolutely nothing of consequence about the way people actually connect these days.