Vikrant Anand clears his throat right at the start of a fairly crucial argument in Dosti ke side effects, and nobody in the cutting room bothered to fix the audio pop. It's a small thing, sure, but it sets the tone for a movie that constantly feels like it was edited in a mild state of exhaustion. Hindi cinema has spent decades trying to crack the code of the youthful buddy drama, usually resulting in glossy posters and songs that try too hard to sound like college anthems, yet this picture wanders into the theater with none of that slick machinery behind it. Director Hadi Ali Abrar approaches the whole thing with the casual indifference of a substitute teacher putting on a VHS tape because the VCR was finally wheeled into the classroom. You look at the screen and you wait for something to happen, and sometimes something does, but mostly you just watch people walk down dusty lanes while a keyboard synthesizer works overtime in the background.

The screenplay behaves as though plotting is a rude suggestion rather than an obligation. Characters wander in and out of frames without much motivation beyond the script needing them to fill an empty space, which leads to entire stretches where conversations drift into nowhere without landing a single punch or a memorable insight. If I'm honest, the narrative structure resembles a pile of laundry that someone kicked under the bed instead of folding. You get scenes about ambition and betrayal that feel like they were written on the back of an envelope five minutes before the cameras started rolling. Sai Ballal pops up occasionally as the kind of gruff authority figure who exists solely to sigh deeply at the youth of today, and he plays it with the tired dignity of a man who knows his paycheck cleared yesterday. There is an entire sub-plot involving local politics that goes absolutely nowhere, dropping off a cliff the moment the writers apparently forgot it was happening.

Then you have Sapna Choudhary, whose screen time is heavily leaned on for promotional purposes even though her character functions mostly as an intermittent weather vane for the mood of the village. She dances with a competent sort of energy that feels severed from any actual emotional stakes in the scene, shot with the flat lighting of a regional television broadcast. Vikrant Anand tries to hold the center together as the nominal lead who has to look troubled by life's unexpected turns, though his performance relies far too heavily on staring out of windows while ambient traffic noise fills the track. He has this habit of squinting whenever the dialogue gets serious, which happens often enough to induce a mild headache. The supporting cast members deliver their lines like they are reading highway safety signs printed in a language they learned in middle school.

Visually, the film resembles Dil Chahta Hai if it were shot on a budget that barely covered the cost of three memory cards and a reflector dish. The camera operators seem genuinely allergic to tripod legs, favoring a handheld wobble that turns every simple conversation across a tea stall into a minor maritime emergency. Color grading appears to have been handled by someone who recently discovered the contrast slider and decided to push it until every shadow turned into a black hole. When a night scene arrives, the grain gets so thick you could practically scrape it off the glass with a butter knife. The sound design is equally sparse, dropping ambient crickets into broad daylight scenes and forgetting to include footsteps entirely when people walk across gravel.

Bollywood movies have a long and storied tradition of misjudging what young people actually talk about when they sit around drinking chai, but Dosti ke side effects achieves a special kind of anthropological flatness. The dialogue lacks rhythm, bouncing between clumsy attempts at street slang and painfully literal statements about the importance of loyalty. You miss the casual snap of a well-written Hindi film when you are sitting through scenes where two actors just repeat each other's names with rising inflection to indicate a disagreement. The music arrives without warning, songs crashing into the middle of conversations that were just starting to find a bit of momentum, forcing everyone to abandon their emotional baggage and start swaying near a tractor.

The core theme of friendship curdling under the weight of financial desperation is old enough to vote, yet this movie treats it like a brand-new scientific discovery. Characters stare into the middle distance and mutter about betrayal as if they are the first human beings to ever experience a falling out over money. It is not a deeply offensive piece of work, nor is it particularly charming in its incompetence; it just sort of exists on the screen, taking up ninety minutes of your afternoon before fading from memory before you even reach the exit doors. You can trace the outlines of a much better movie buried somewhere under the loose pacing and the rough dubbing, but digging it out would require more patience than the production itself possessed.