The nasal whine hits you about four minutes in and doesn't really let go until the credits roll over a blue-tinted beach that looks aggressively artificial.

Himesh Reshammiya wears a cap pulled so low over his forehead that you spend the first half-hour wondering how he navigates a crowded Mumbai street without walking directly into a lantern post, though to be fair, the streets here are mostly constructed on a soundstage in Film City anyway. A New Love Ishtory tries to palm off this particular brand of middle-aged vanity as youthful longing, and it is a strange experience watching a man who looks perpetually annoyed by a pebble in his shoe attempt to woo Niharika Singh through songs that sound like they were recorded inside a galvanized bucket during a thunderstorm. Bollywood has a long, illustrious history of casting actors who possess the romantic magnetism of a wet cardboard box, but there is something uniquely exhausting about the way Reshammiya anchors every single frame with his chin tucked into his chest like he is about to headbutt an imaginary referee. If I'm honest, the whole thing feels like a vanity project that somehow lost its budget halfway through pre-production and had to make do with whatever leather jackets were left lying around the costume department.

The direction by whoever actually sat in the chair—the credits are a bit muddy on this point—manages to make every single dialogue scene look like a mid-2000s cell phone commercial. Rakesh Bapat shows up as the obligatory third wheel, grinning through scenes with the desperate energy of a guy who knows his flight leaves for Bangkok immediately after his final wrap. He gets some of the worst lines ever committed to celluloid in modern Hindi cinema, mostly consisting of variations on the phrase "brother, leave her, she isn't worth it," delivered while leaning against a pillar that wobbles visibly under his weight. The screenplay proceeds in fits and starts, abandoning entire subplots about corporate betrayal and family honor whenever the composer decides it is time for another ballad about broken hearts on a rooftop. Nobody talks like real people talk in this movie; they speak in rhyming couplets that have been run through an online translation tool twice, leaving every interaction smelling faintly of stale hair gel and desperation.

Cinematographer Ravi Kumar seems to have discovered a filter that turns every daylight exterior the color of a bruised plum, and he sticks with it for two agonizing hours. There's a recurring visual motif where a stray dog wanders into the background of romantic sequences, sniffing at trash while Himesh belts out high notes that make studio microphones whimper. It's a small thing, but it bugged me every single time it happened because nobody on set apparently bothered to shoo the poor animal away, making it the most authentic performer in the entire production. Watching Niharika Singh try to register genuine emotional distress while a stray mongrel scratches its ear behind her left shoulder is the kind of accidental comedy that keeps late-night television programmers in business. The editing does no favors either, cutting away from reaction shots half a beat too early as if the editor was trying to catch the last local train out of Goregaon before the monsoon hit.

Comparisons to Karzzzz are inevitable, even if this one lacks the gonzo-horror energy that made that particular disaster watchable after midnight. Here, the tone is stuck in a weird purgatory between a glossy urban romance and a local cable access music video, never quite committing to the campy absurdity that might have saved it from the boredom pile. Hindi movies often struggle when they try to manufacture heartbreak out of thin air, but this one doesn't even have the courtesy to give its characters actual jobs or hobbies to distract us from their perpetual moping. They just exist in a vacuum of bad lighting and worse tailoring, moving from one pastel-drenched interior to another without a single trace of interior life.

The soundtrack dominates every scene to an aggressive degree, pumping synthesized strings into moments where two people are simply trying to eat a sandwich across a Formica table. You can't hear the dialogue half the time because the background score is trying to convince you that buying a bouquet of plastic roses from a traffic light vendor is a revolutionary political act. It reminds you of why some directors should never be allowed anywhere near the mixing console, especially when they have an ego the size of a suburban housing complex.

When the third act arrives with its mandatory misunderstanding at the airport cargo terminal, you are already checking your watch to see if there's enough time to order groceries before the delivery window closes. The resolution doesn't resolve anything so much as it simply stops happening, cutting abruptly to a freeze-frame of the lead actor pointing vaguely toward the horizon while a chorus chants something about eternal devotion. It's not a disaster born of ambition, exactly, but rather the quiet, grinding failure of people who stopped caring about the script around page ten and just wanted to collect their daily allowance.