Jai Verma's jawline is so aggressively chiseled in the opening scenes of Baar Baar Dekho that it practically demands its own billing in the opening credits, hovering there through mathematical equations he solves on blackboards with the intense, furrowed focus of a man trying to calculate the trajectory of a very important rocket. Nitya is sitting right there, waiting for him to pick a wedding date, but Sidharth Malhotra looks less like a man about to get married to Katrina Kaif and more like an executive who just realized he left his phone charger in an Uber. It is a strange energy to bring to a romance, stiff and distracted, though maybe that was the point from the very first frame. If I'm honest, the math professor angle feels completely fake, like someone read a Wikipedia summary of what smart people look like and decided it involved squinting at chalk. Nitya is an artist, which in Bollywood movies usually means she wears oversized scarves and paints canvases that look like abstract explosions of cheap acrylic, and she wants a commitment that doesn't involve tenure tracks or academic fellowships in Cambridge. He stalls. She leaves. He drinks too much whiskey alone in his apartment, stares at a glowing red alarm clock that looks suspiciously like a prop from an 80s sci-fi B-movie, and wakes up the next day with a completely different haircut and a wife.

Director Nitya Mehra treats the time-jumping premise with a strange sort of flat-footed literalism that drains the magic right out of the room, leaping forward days, months, and decades without ever bothering to make the transitions feel earned or even visually distinct beyond the actors wearing more grey in their beards. There is a terrible transition involving a train station tunnel that looks like it was lit by a stressed intern with a flashlight, casting muddy shadows across Sidharth Malhotra's forehead as he stumbles into yet another future he didn't ask for. The screenplay, credited to Sri Rao along with Anuvab Pal and the director herself, has this annoying habit of treating chronological disruption like a PowerPoint presentation, clicking from slide to slide with loud, obnoxious narrative thuds. You get scenes of domestic friction in London kitchens that feel less like a marriage falling apart and more like a high-end IKEA commercial where the couple is silently furious about the assembly instructions. Ram Kapoor shows up as the stern future father-in-law who dispenses gravelly wisdom while wearing cardigans that cost more than my first car, and every single time he opens his mouth to deliver a lecture on the value of seizing the present moment, the movie grinds to a grinding, teeth-sucking halt. It is all so terribly polite and well-funded, shot through a permanent Instagram filter of warm golden hour light that makes even a mid-life crisis look like a glossy layout in Architectural Digest, which somehow robs the emotional fallout of any actual grit.

Katrina Kaif has spent a decade perfecting this specific brand of radiant exasperation, and she deploys it here with varying degrees of success, floating through timelines in an assortment of boho-chic dresses that probably cost a small fortune. There are moments when she looks genuinely tired of having to react to Malhotra's permanent expression of bewildered vacancy, her eyes flat and distant during emotional confrontations that are supposed to tear our hearts out. When she has to cry, she does it with this delicate, tear-free precision that suggests she is worried about messing up her foundation, which makes their reconciliation scenes play out with the emotional intensity of a delayed flight announcement. Malhotra, meanwhile, treats acting like a physical endurance sport where the primary objective is to maintain maximum posture while looking mildly offended by whatever dialogue has just been handed to him. Watching him try to convey middle-aged exhaustion is an exercise in pure comedy because his posture remains stubbornly upright, his shoulders back, his hair defying gravity with the help of enough gel to cement a brick wall. They have zero chemistry, and I don't mean that in the lazy way critics use it when they just want actors to kiss more, but in the fundamental way these two human beings occupy space on screen without ever acknowledging that the other person is standing right there. It reminds me of watching Shahid Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor in Mausam, where two gorgeous people are placed in proximity and told to generate passion purely through the power of their costuming and the romantic sweep of the score.

The soundtrack is stuffed to the gills with tracks that try desperately to rescue a flagging narrative momentum, blasting upbeat bhangra remixes at moments of severe domestic crisis just to keep the audience from checking their watches. "Kala Chashma" arrives out of nowhere at a wedding reception that feels like a massive corporate event sponsored by a luxury car brand, and everyone dances with that practiced, gym-honed synchronization that drains all the spontaneous joy out of a party. Cinematographer}}}=\_ Ravi K. Chandran points his camera at everything with immaculate, glossy detachment, capturing the pristine streets of London and the sun-drenched beaches of Thailand with the cold perfection of a real estate brochure. Every frame is polished until it squeaks, devoid of texture or dirt or anything that might suggest a real person actually lives in these spaces. Even the tears look expensive, catching the studio lighting just right as they roll down cheekbones that have clearly known the gentle touch of a high-end facialist. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how every single glass of scotch poured on screen looks like it was filled with cold tea and iced with perfectly square artisanal cubes that never melt, even when characters are having screaming matches that last for twenty dramatic minutes.

Underneath the gloss, the film is obsessed with this deeply conservative middle-class anxiety about work-life balance, suggesting that the only way to save a marriage is to abandon all professional ambition and spend your entire life lounging around art galleries holding hands. Hindi films have long had a complicated relationship with success, often punishing ambitious men by making them emotionally vacant monsters who need to be taught the value of family through some magical intervention, but this takes it to a bizarre, almost punitive extreme. Jai is made to feel guilty not for being a bad person, but for wanting to be good at math and secure a prestigious fellowship, as if intellectual curiosity is a direct personal insult to his wife's ability to pick out throw pillows. The time travel mechanics are never explained because the filmmakers know that if you spend more than two seconds thinking about the logistics of skipping ahead in time via a glowing alarm clock, the whole fragile structure falls apart like a house built of wet cardboard. It is less a science fiction conceit and more a very long, very expensive lecture disguised as a romantic comedy, wagging its manicured finger at anyone who ever stayed late at the office to finish a spreadsheet. We are told repeatedly that we must cherish every single second, yet the movie itself drags its feet through endless repetitions of the exact same argument in slightly different kitchens, making ninety minutes feel like a very polite hostage situation.

By the time the credits finally roll, you are left with the distinct impression of having attended a very long, very expensive wedding for two people you don't actually know or care about, smiling through the speeches because the catering was decent. The resolution arrives with such abrupt, arbitrary ease that it completely invalidates whatever mild tension had managed to accumulate over the previous two hours, wrapping up every existential crisis with a cheesy smile and a hug. It wants so badly to be a profound meditation on mortality and love, but it settles instead for being a pleasant screensaver you can leave running in the background while you fold laundry on a lazy Sunday afternoon. There is a version of this story that had teeth, something that actually dug into the terror of commitment and the way ordinary choices slowly ossify into regret, but this isn't it. This is just a parade of pretty outfits and expensive haircuts pretending to have an existential crisis in a very clean kitchen, hoping the audience won't notice that nobody inside the frame is actually breathing.