The shirt Arjun Kapoor wears during the first twenty minutes of Mere Husband Ki Biwi has a pocket that appears entirely non-functional, sewn crookedly into a linen blend that immediately betrays its budget, and if I am honest, I stared at that crooked pocket for half the runtime because the screen offered me so very little else to anchor my gaze.

Hindi cinema has spent the better part of a decade trying to modernize the domestic farce, usually by swapping out the door-slamming mechanics of David Dhawan for something more upscale, more pastel, more concerned with people who own expensive coffee makers and micro-problems. Here, the premise feels older than the century it is playing in, a tangled web of accidental bigamy and frantic lying that requires its characters to sprint through corridors with expressions of mild dismay plastered across their faces while the background score works overtime to convince us that hilarity is occurring right now, please laugh.

Mudassar Aziz directs with the steady, uninspired hand of a man who has looked at three hundred episodes of television and decided that coverage is king, meaning we get endless medium shots of people standing in living rooms talking about who was where at nine o'clock last Tuesday. The screenplay refuses to let a scene breathe for even a fraction of a second, cutting away from punchlines before they land and inserting reaction shots of supporting actors who look like they were filmed three days later against a green screen that was slightly out of focus. There is a relentless, exhausting rhythm to the editing that prevents any real comedic timing from developing, substituting rapid cuts for actual wit.

Arjun Kapoor plays the harried husband with the same heavy-lidded bewilderment he brought to Mubarakan, though here the charm is dialled down to a point where he simply seems annoyed to be in the frame, dragging his feet through scenes that demand a manic, breathless energy. He has this habit of letting his mouth hang open slightly during close-ups when he is supposed to be listening to his wife lie to his other wife, and it stops being a character choice around the halfway mark and starts looking like a man trying to remember if he left his car lights on.

Bhumi Pednekar fares slightly better simply because she has learned how to inject a tiny bit of actual malice into her line deliveries, slicing through the sanitized suburban dialogue with a sharp, nasal bite that occasionally wakes the audience up. Her character is written as a shrew by writers who clearly didn't bother to read past the first draft of the character breakdown, but she pushes against the cardboard edges of the role with enough physical commitment to make you wish she was starring in a different, better movie—something closer to what Rhea Chakraborty was doing in Chehre before that film fell apart.

Rakul Preet Singh floats through the periphery in a role that requires her to wear an awful lot of cream-colored knitwear and look deeply concerned while standing near kitchen islands, her performance consisting mostly of head tilts and soft sighs that suggest she received her motivation notes via WhatsApp five minutes before rolling cameras. The chemistry between the three leads is nonexistent, less a triangle and more three parallel lines that refuse to intersect even when the plot physically shoves them into the same elevator.

The cinematography looks like it was lit by someone who discovered a ring light on Amazon yesterday and decided to blast every single wall in the rented apartment set until the paint lost all texture, creating a flat, glaring brightness that drains the color out of every frame. The sound design is even more baffling, featuring Foley work that clearly added the sound of ice cubes clinking in glasses during scenes where the characters are drinking tea out of ceramic mugs, a small detail, sure, but it's the kind of sloppy execution that runs through the whole production.

Hindi movies have a long, proud tradition of marital chaos, going back to the golden era of bedroom farces where the stakes felt genuine even when the premise was completely ridiculous, but contemporary Bollywood often forgets that farce requires a certain mechanical precision to work. Here, every joke is telegraphed five minutes in advance with heavy-handed musical cues that sound like they were downloaded from a royalty-free library of a mid-tier YouTube travel vlogger, completely neutering any surprise the narrative might have been holding onto.

The thematic undercurrents are painfully thin, gesturing vaguely at modern relationship dynamics and the pressures of maintaining appearances in urban spaces before backing away nervously whenever things threaten to get even slightly uncomfortable or messy, opting instead for another slapstick sequence involving a wardrobe malfunction or a mistaken identity that belongs in a ninety-sixties stage play. No one involved seems willing to interrogate the actual cruelty of the situation these people have constructed for themselves, preferring to skate along the surface of bad behavior with a bland, toothless smile.

When the credits finally roll, you are left with the distinct impression of having sat through an eighty-minute commercial for modular kitchens that somebody accidentally stretched out to two hours by adding five songs that all sound like rejected drafts from a Badshah album, leaving behind no memorable lines, no striking images, and not a single reason to care which wife gets the apartment.