There is a specific kind of sigh Anushka Sharma makes about twenty minutes into Jab Harry Met Sejal that sounds less like acting and more like somebody dropping a heavy bag of groceries on a hardwood floor. It is tired, slightly aggressive, and entirely out of place in a mainstream movie where heroines are usually styled to look like they float across cobblestones. She plays Sejal, a Gujarati girl who has lost an engagement ring in Europe and enlists a cynical tour guide named Harry to help her retrace her steps through various continental cities, which sounds like the setup for a breezy caper until you realize Imtiaz Ali is directing it, meaning everybody involved is going to spend the next two hours talking about their internal emptiness while standing in front of gorgeous European architecture. The screenwriting has this weird habit of treating geography like a mood ring where every time the characters cross a border, they immediately stop at a café to have a conversation about whether they actually like each other or just miss home. It is a long way from the confident, propulsive storytelling of Tamasha, letting scenes linger five seconds past their expiration date just so we can watch Shah Rukh Khan smoke a cigarette while looking vaguely distressed in a dimly lit alleyway.

Shah Rukh plays Harinder Singh Nehra, a man who left Punjab to become a singer, failed, and settled into the profoundly unglamorous profession of shepherding loud families through European museums while nursing a permanent scowl that suggests he would rather be root canal surgery. If I'm honest, his performance relies a bit too heavily on the classic weary-lover playbook we have seen him run through in half a dozen previous romantic dramas, leaning against doorframes and looking through people with those famous sad eyes. He still has this incredible knack for making you believe he is completely undone by a woman's presence, even when the dialogue he is given sounds like a self-help pamphlet translated through three different languages. Sharma matches him scene for scene with a hyperactive delivery that turns into something genuinely grating before it finally settles down into a softer, more vulnerable register somewhere around the middle of the third act. They have undeniable screen chemistry, which is the only reason the movie stays upright during stretches where the plot essentially grinds to a halt and everyone just talks about commitment issues in hotel lobbies.

The cinematography by K.U. Mohanan does something interesting with light, preferring overcast skies and washed-out European plazas over the usual tourist-brochure gloss you expect from these overseas productions. It makes the cities look lived-in and slightly damp, matching the bruised emotional states of the two leads. Then there is the soundtrack by Pritam, which functions as the actual pulse of the entire enterprise, carrying whole emotional arcs across sequences where the script just kind of gives up and lets the music do the heavy lifting. One song in particular, the one with the butterfly motif, repeats so many times across the runtime that you start hearing it in your sleep, which is annoying because it is a decent track the first three times it plays. That kind of mechanical repetition plagues the sound design generally, with background chatter in the tour group scenes looped so badly that you can hear the exact same American tourist complaining about her feet in three different cities.

Imtiaz Ali has always been obsessed with the idea of home and the people who are constitutionally incapable of staying in one place, which works wonderfully when he is making quirky indie-flavored dramas about tortured artists but feels a bit heavy-handed when applied to a standard star vehicle for the biggest names in Hindi cinema. Harry is supposed to be this lost soul, a man who has forgotten his village and his language, yet he wears expensive leather jackets and drives a nice car through Amsterdam without ever explaining how a tour guide affords such a lifestyle on tips alone. These little logic gaps wouldn't matter if the emotional logic held firm, but too many scenes pivot on behavioral turns that feel engineered to hit a specific trailer beat rather than grow organically out of the characters. We get these long stretches where Sejal insists she isn't leaving until she finds her ring, completely ignoring the fact that she has a fiancé waiting back in Mumbai who seems remarkably unconcerned that his bride-to-be is careening through red-light districts with a strange man.

There is an interesting conversation to be had about how contemporary Bollywood movies handle the intersection of traditional values and modern mobility, though this film mostly skirts around the edges of that idea in favor of endless train rides and rain-soaked heart-to-hearts. Hindi films have spent decades trying to figure out how to put their heroes abroad without losing that distinct domestic emotional core, and while Jab Harry Met Sejal captures the exhausting loneliness of the diaspora better than most, it ultimately retreats into familiar romantic resolutions that feel a bit too neat for characters who have spent two hours tearing each other apart. The supporting cast barely registers because the script keeps them locked outside the central two-person dynamic, functioning as mere obstacles or comic relief rather than real people with their own interior lives. That focus isn't inherently a bad choice, but it puts an enormous amount of pressure on Khan and Sharma to keep the energy up through sequences that simply do not have enough narrative meat to justify their length. When the film works, it is because these two actors are genuinely fun to watch argue about nothing in particular on a bench somewhere in Prague. When it drags, and it does drag in chunks during the middle hour, it feels like a very long commercial for European rail passes backed by a moody pop score. I kept waiting for a scene that would completely reframe everything that came before it, some sharp narrative pivot that would justify the rambling structure, but it never arrives, leaving us with a pleasant enough road trip that forgets to pack a destination.