There is a specific kind of train window in Indian railways that doesn't quite latch right, rattling against its frame with a dull, aluminum-on-iron clatter that cuts through dialogue tracks with the stubborn persistence of a bad loop. Jalebi opens on that rattle, long before the strings swell or the title card drops, and if I'm honest, that sound stayed with me louder than any of the emotional turmoil happening inside the compartment. Pushpdeep Bhardwaj directs this thing like he is terrified of silence, filling every microsecond of breathing room with a piano swell or a voiceover whisper that sounds like it was recorded in a walk-in closet with five coats hanging on the walls. It is an official remake of a Bengali film called Praktan, though you wouldn't know it from the way the script scrambles its chronology into a pretzel that resembles the title pastry only in its tendency to get stuck in your teeth. We meet Dev and Aisha when their marriage is already a heap of ashes, sharing a berth because fate has a deeply unoriginal sense of humor and because the plot requires them to rehash every grievance they ever aired over burnt toast in their Delhi apartment. The screenplay bounces back and forth between their sun-drenched courtship, which looks suspiciously like a tourism board brochure for Old Delhi spice markets, and their present-day misery on a train to nowhere in particular. It’s a classic Hindi film trap, taking a premise that could have been a sharp, uncomfortable ninety minutes about two people who simply irritate each other past the point of return and stretching it into a bloated two-hour endurance test of longing looks and heavy-handed metaphors about how love is like a sugary coil that burns you if you eat it too fast.

Rhea Chakraborty plays Aisha as a bundle of urban anxieties wrapped in a series of extremely sensible kurtas, gazing out at the passing scenery with eyes that are perpetually welling up without quite spilling over into actual tears. She spends a lot of time writing in a journal, because in movies like this, internal thoughts are never allowed to remain internal; they must be scribbled down on cream-colored paper with a fountain pen so the audience can read her voiceover narration word for word. Opposite her, Varun Mitra tries his absolute best to find some grit in Dev, a man whose primary character trait is that he loves old buildings and hates compromise, but the script reduces him to a collection of wounded sighs and sudden outbursts of poetic dialogue that nobody would ever say out loud in a railway station. They lack the lived-in friction of a real couple who have grown to despise each other's breathing habits, falling instead into the standard romantic drama rhythm of glaring across a table before breaking into slow-motion running sequences through rain-slicked courtyards. Digangana Suryavanshi shows up later as the second wife, an angelic creature whose only narrative purpose is to be wonderfully understanding and make Dev feel guilty for having a past, which she does with a serene smile that belongs in a toothpaste commercial rather than a domestic drama about fractured hearts. There is a supporting actor who plays Dev's train companion, a chatty older man meant to dispense folksy wisdom about letting go, and his dubbing is so horribly out of sync with his mouth movements that every time he speaks, you are instantly jerked right out of the emotional stakes of the scene. It's a small thing, sure, but when a film relies entirely on the intimacy of two people talking in a cramped coupe, a floating audio track that sounds like it was pumped in from an adjacent room tends to destroy whatever illusion the cinematographer is trying to build.

Speaking of the cinematography, Laxman souvent relies on a yellowish lens filter that makes every exterior shot look like it was captured during a severe Delhi dust storm, draining the colors until everything is just shades of mustard and beige. Even the night scenes have this weird amber glow, as if the train's overhead bulbs were dipped in honey, which gets exhausting on the eyes after the first forty minutes of continuous brooding. The soundtrack, composed by a small committee of hit-makers, does heavy lifting that the screenplay simply refuses to do, recycling the same three-note piano motif until you can hum it in your sleep. Jeet Gannguli’s tunes are catchy enough in a commercial radio sort of way, but they are dropped into scenes with the subtlety of a falling anvil, cueing up the strings the exact second an actor's chin begins to quiver. It reminds me of Mohit Suri's Aashiqui 2, another picture that believed volume equaled depth and that every emotional peak needed to be underscored by a soaring ballad about dying without the other person. Yet unlike that film, which managed to ground its melodrama in the grubby reality of touring bars and recording studios, Jalebi floats in a weirdly sterile vacuum where nobody ever seems to have a real job or worry about rent, leaving them entirely free to contemplate their own tragic emotional architectures twenty-four hours a day.

The core theme here is memory as a form of self-torture, the idea that letting go of someone you hurt is harder than staying with them and continuing the mutual punishment. Bhardwaj wants to examine how modern romantic choices collide with traditional expectations of sacrifice and duty, particularly through Aisha’s struggles to balance her writing ambitions with Dev’s stubborn attachment to his hometown roots. But the movie treats these conflicts with a strange superficiality, reducing compromise to a shouting match in a courtyard and maturity to a lingering glance through a glass window as a train pulls away from the platform. Bollywood movies have historically excelled at the art of the tearjerker, knowing precisely which emotional buttons to push to get a theater reaching for their handkerchiefs, but this one feels calculated by an algorithm that took all the tropes of heartbreak and mashed them together without understanding why they worked in the first place. There is no real sense of danger in their separation, no economic reality or social pressure that makes their breakup feel inevitable rather than merely stubborn. They just refuse to communicate like adults, preferring to retreat into separate corners of the frame while the camera pans up to the ceiling fan to suggest profound existential weight.

By the time the train finally reaches its destination, the characters have undergone a transformation that feels entirely cosmetic, trading one set of melancholic expressions for another without having actually learned anything about themselves or each other. The final scenes attempt to wrap up the narrative threads with a tidy little bow of forgiveness, but it rings hollow because the preceding two hours have been spent cataloging every petty insult and broken promise without ever finding the humanity underneath the bitterness. Hindi cinema has given us some truly devastating portraits of failed marriages over the decades, films that understand the slow, quiet erosion of affection much better than this loud, over-lit exercise in cinematic nostalgia. Jalebi wants to be a timeless romance about the sweet and sour nature of attachment, but it mostly just leaves a sticky residue that you want to wash off your hands as soon as the credits start to roll.