Priyanka Chopra is wearing a mustard yellow top in that one scene near the end and it just sticks in your head for some reason. The film starts from the grave, literally, with Aisha Chaudhary narrating her own death and subsequent family dynamics from some sort of cosmic waiting room, which is a choice that usually makes me want to slide right out of my cinema seat and check my watch. Yet Shonali Bose directs this material with a kind of restless, breathless energy that refuses to settle into the standard melodramatic groove of Hindi movies where everyone cries into handkerchiefs while the strings swell. You get the sense she was trying to avoid the obvious traps of the terminal illness drama, even when the script walks right up to those traps and taps on the glass. There is an audacity in how the chronology bounces back and forth like a ping-pong ball played by someone who drank three espressos too many, jumping from 2014 to 1996 and back again without a single polite warning. This structural chaos could easily have felt like a mess, but instead it mimics the frantic, disorganized way memory actually functions when you are trying to piece together how a life fell apart and then somehow held together again. The screenplay, co-written by Bose and Nilesh Maniyar, takes actual diary entries and real interviews and turns them into dialogue that occasionally sounds a bit too clever for its own good, but mostly lands with a bruised, honest weight. You watch these parents argue over insurance policies and hospital corridors while their daughter makes dry remarks about her own failing lungs, and you realize you are not watching a tragedy about dying so much as a grueling, messy endurance test about staying married.

Zaira Wasim narrates the whole affair with a deadpan weariness that anchors the movie whenever it threatens to float away into glossy commercial sentimentality. She plays Aisha with zero self-pity, which is remarkable given the script gives her every excuse to indulge in inspirational monologues about seizing the day and finding the beauty in every breath. She just looks exhausted, annoyed by her oxygen tank, and slightly embarrassed by her parents' relentless optimism. It is a quiet, receding kind of acting that feels older than her years, especially when contrasted with the sheer hurricane force of Priyanka Chopra and Farhan Akhtar playing her parents, Aditi and Niren. Chopra, who also produced the thing, tears into the role of the fierce, unyielding mother with claws out and jaw set, screaming at doctors and crying in stairwells with a raw desperation that feels entirely unvarnished. She makes Aditi difficult to love at times, which makes her infinitely more believable than the standard saintly mother figure usually found in bollywood melodramas. Farhan Akhtar plays the steady, perpetually anxious husband with a soft-spoken charm that occasionally gets flattened by Chopra's louder, more demanding performance, though they share a chemistry that feels lived-in and genuinely frayed at the edges. They look like a couple who fell in love in their teens and have survived too many earthquakes to know how to be polite to each other anymore. When they fight in a car over money and medical bills, it has the claustrophobic terror of Marriage Story, that sudden realization that the person holding your hand is also the person who knows exactly how to break you.

The cinematography by Nick Cooke uses a lot of handheld grain and natural light that makes Delhi look dusty, loud, and suffocatingly intimate, bouncing between cramped apartments and sterile hospital rooms with dizzying speed. Then there is the soundtrack by Mikey McCleary, which deploys these gentle, acoustic indie-pop tracks that sometimes threaten to turn the whole enterprise into a commercial for a boutique coffee brand, especially during the montage sequences where everyone is smiling through their tears in slow motion. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how often those upbeat acoustic guitars kick in right when a scene gets genuinely uncomfortable, smoothing over the jagged edges of a fight just so the audience can catch their breath. The editing by Manan Mittal matches the structural gymnastics of the narrative, splicing home video footage and photographs of the real Aisha Chaudhary into the fictional fabric of the movie to blur the line between documentary and drama. That technique can feel manipulative, a cheap way to borrow real grief for fictional resonance, but here it works because the actors react to the emotional stakes with such total commitment. You stop noticing the seams after the first half hour, swept along by the sheer momentum of the pacing, even if certain supporting players are clearly dubbed by studio voice actors whose lips never quite sync up with the dialogue track. It is the kind of technical slip-up that happens when post-production is rushed, reminding you that despite the polished sheen of the international co-production, this is still very much a hurried product of the system.

What saves the film from its own occasional tendency toward emotional blackmail is its stubborn focus on the unglamorous economics of dying. Medical debt, insurance fraud, the logistics of moving countries for better treatment, the way friendships wither because nobody knows what to say to parents whose kid has a shelf life—these are the details that ground the narrative in actual reality. Hindi films have traditionally treated illness as a moral test or a poetic curse, something that ennobles the sufferer and redeems the sinners around them, but Bose treats it mostly as a logistical nightmare that ruins your sleep and drains your bank account. Aditi and Niren are not brought closer together by their daughter's SCID diagnosis in some magical spiritual awakening; they drift apart, they resent each other, they cheat on their sleep schedules, they scream at God in empty hallways. The film understands that grief is not a straight line from denial to acceptance, but a looping, looping circle of anger and exhaustion that occasionally pauses for a moment of unexpected grace. When Aisha finally passes away, the movie does not linger on a grand, tear-jerking deathbed monologue, because the real story was never about her dying anyway. It was always about the people left behind in the room, holding the empty oxygen tanks and trying to figure out how to make breakfast the next morning when the sun comes up whether you want it to or not.

There is no grand takeaway here, no neat little moral about cherishing every heartbeat or finding the silver lining in a dark cloud, which makes the closing moments surprisingly refreshing. The final scenes show the family trying to rebuild their lives in London, scarred, tired, and fundamentally altered by the absence of the girl who used to narrate their lives from the clouds. It is uneven, messy, and occasionally too pleased with its own non-linear cleverness, but it leaves you with images that linger long after the mustard yellow top has faded from memory. You walk out thinking about Chopra's face when she realizes she cannot fix this, and you realize that is enough.