Fawad Khan wears this terrible scarf in the middle act of Kapoor and Sons that looks like it was bought on a rushed layover in Dubai, and every time it appears on screen I find myself entirely distracted from whatever emotional crisis the family is currently screaming about.

Director Shakun Batra wants us to look at the mess of domesticity without smoothing out the edges, and for the most part, he actually pulls it off. Hindi films usually love a clean resolution where everybody hugs under fairy lights and forgets they just spent two hours being emotionally manipulative monsters to each other. This one does not do that. Instead, it drops us into a house in Coonoor where Harsh and Sunita Kapoor are sniping at each other over breakfast toast while their grown sons bring entirely separate piles of baggage into the guest rooms. The screenplay, co-written by Batra and Ayesha DeVitre, treats silence as a weapon rather than an absence of sound, letting arguments sputter out because nobody has the energy to maintain their rage for more than four uninterrupted minutes. It is messy in the way family WhatsApp groups get messy after midnight, full of old grievances that nobody asked to revive but everyone insists on dragging into the light anyway.

Rishi Kapoor plays the grandfather who is desperately trying to stay relevant by watching porn on a tablet and asking his grandsons when they are going to give him a great-grandchild, and he manages to steal every single scene he is in without turning into a cartoon prop. Under heavy prosthetics that must have felt like wearing a damp wool sweater in a sauna, he brings a raspy, exhausted vitality to a man who refuses to die quietly while his family falls apart around him. It is a performance that reminds you why he was so much more than just the romantic lead of his generation, especially when he sits alone on the porch and looks out over the valley with an expression that suggests he has seen this exact same fight happen twenty times before across four different decades. Opposite him, Ratna Pathak Shah holds the entire narrative together with a jawline so clenched you can practically hear her molars grinding down to powder whenever her golden-child son Rahul walks into the room.

Sid Malhotra struggles a bit with the heavy lifting required for Arjun, the struggling writer who feels like he was left off to the side while his older brother got handed the manual for how to be successful. He plays a lot of scenes with his head down and his shoulders hunched, which works for the character on paper but leaves long stretches where he just looks annoyed rather than genuinely devastated. When he and Alia Bhatt share screen time, the movie dips into that glossy, Instagram-ready aesthetic that usually dominates modern romantic comedies, though thankfully Batra keeps pulling them back toward the kitchen table before things get too glossy. Bhatt does a lot of heavy lifting with just her eyes, reacting to the passive-aggressive warfare around her with the exhausted patience of a family friend who has stayed over for dinner one too many times and now knows where all the bodies are buried.

Then Fawad Khan shows up as Rahul, the successful novelist living in London who returns home carrying a secret that is supposed to blow the family apart, though honestly, the way everyone reacts feels like they are reading from a completely different script than the one Rajat Kapoor is using as the stressed-out, financially ruined father. Rajat plays failure with a pathetic, slouching authenticity that makes you want to look away from the screen, particularly during those scenes where he tries to borrow money from his own children and fails to maintain any sort of authority. The cinematography by Jeffrey Garcia keeps the house feeling slightly too small for all these people, shooting the narrow hallways and crowded living rooms with a claustrophobic warmth that makes you want to reach for a glass of cold water.

There is a specific kind of passive-aggressive bickering in this household that feels entirely authentic to the way urban middle-class families operate in contemporary Hindi cinema, far removed from the lavish, weeping patriarchs of older melodrama. We have seen versions of this dysfunctional dynamic before in Do Dooni Chaar, but Batra pushes the cruelty just a fraction further, letting the characters say things they cannot take back and then forcing them to sit in the quiet room afterward. When the family secret finally drops, it does not arrive with a grand monologue or a dramatic thunderstorm outside the window. It happens in the middle of a routine argument about property and mortgages, which somehow makes the impact land much harder than if they had staged it on a rainy railway platform.

The soundtrack by Amaal Mallik, Arko, and Badshah has that tinny, over-produced radio gloss that tends to date movies about five minutes after they leave the theater, but the background score by Sameer Uddin knows when to back off and let the sound of a slamming door do the work instead. It is a small detail, but letting scenes end on natural room tone rather than swelling strings makes the melodrama feel earned rather than forced upon us by an editor who thinks we might miss the emotional beat. Even so, the editing in the final twenty minutes feels slightly rushed, as if the studio got nervous about runtime and told them to chop out thirty pages of dialogue about real estate debts.

Not every narrative thread gets tied up neatly in a bow, and I appreciate that the movie refuses to tell us whether Arjun and Tia actually make it as a couple once they leave the hills behind. They just drive away in a dusty hatchback with their relationship still slightly bruised and their futures entirely unwritten, which feels a lot truer to life than any romantic epiphany ever could.