Rahul Bose wears this particular shade of grey wool jacket that feels entirely wrong for the sticky Mumbai afternoons his character supposedly inhabits, and I kept wondering throughout the first reel whether his costume designer simply didn't care or was making a very dry point about upper-middle-class suffocation. Bernadt Pinto directing Kucch Love Jaisa is the sort of proposition that makes you look at release calendars from 2011 with a mild sense of archaeological confusion, wondering how a picture this structurally unbothered by commercial imperatives managed to secure a theatrical footprint at all, let alone one featuring recognisable faces from across the spectrum of Hindi films. You sit there in the dark and watch the machinery grind into gear, waiting for the mandatory item number or the broad comic relief character with a stutter, and instead you get long, unbroken sequences of two people sitting in a generic suburban apartment talking about nothing very important at all, which is either brave or commercially suicidal depending on your tolerance for cinematic stasis. It is a strange sort of movie, not great, not bad, just there, hanging around the edges of your attention span like an acquaintance who shows up early to a party and then forgets where they left their car keys.

The screenplay by Sameer Sharma and Pinto wants to be a quiet little Mumbai urban fable about two lonely souls crossing paths during a rainy afternoon, but it keeps tripping over its own desire to feel profound about mundane domestic stagnation. Shefali Chhaya plays Madhu, a housewife whose husband treats her like a helpful household appliance with a pulse, and she has this habit of staring out the kitchen window at passing suburban locals with an expression that suggests she is mentally rewriting her grocery list to include arsenic. When she accidentally hooks up with Bose's Raghav—an executive whose life is essentially an endless series of PowerPoint presentations punctuated by cold coffee—the script expects us to buy into this sudden afternoon of hooky as a major existential pivot, but the narrative rhythm is so flat-footed that it feels less like a radical act of rebellion and more like two people missing their dentist appointments. The dialogue oscillates wildly between the kind of stilted poetic observations that nobody has ever said out loud in a suburban railway compartment and genuinely sharp, uncomfortable observations about how married people inflict small emotional papercuts on each other over breakfast. You can see the scaffolding of the scene construction from three miles away, particularly whenever the background score decides to swell up and tell you precisely how to feel about a character looking thoughtfully at a wet pavement.

Bose has this specific acting gear where he lowers his voice to an almost imperceptible murmur and cocks his head slightly to the left, and he relies on it far too often here to signal intellectual fatigue. He plays Raghav as a man made entirely of beige cardigans and unreturned phone calls, which makes his sporadic attempts at charm feel slightly creepy rather than endearing, though to be fair, the script doesn't give him much room to manoeuvre beyond looking vaguely embarrassed in public spaces. Chhaya, on the other hand, does something rather remarkable with a character that could have easily been written off as a standard-issue suburban martyr. She anchors Kucch Love Jaisa with a performance of genuine stillness, refusing to overplay her character's quiet desperation even when the direction practically begs her to burst into tears or deliver a monologue about the death of romance. When she shares screen time with Neetu Chandra—who shows up as a high-spirited sex worker with a heart of gold that feels imported straight from a 1970s parallel cinema script—the contrast in acting styles is jarring enough to give you whiplash, moving instantly from naturalistic kitchen-sink exhaustion to the kind of theatrical broadness you usually associate with commercial Bollywood movies released during the lean summer months of the early noughties. Sumeet Raghavan pops up as the neglected husband with the permanent look of mild grievance that you often see on men who spend too much time complaining about local train delays, and Manmeet Singh adds to the general texture of urban alienation without ever leaving much of a lasting impression.

Visually, the film looks like it was graded by someone who had just discovered the desaturation slider on a mid-range editing suite and decided that every frame needed to look like an overcast Tuesday afternoon in Goregaon. The cinematography by Alphonse Roy relies on an endless parade of reflections in rainy car windows and moody close-ups of ceiling fans spinning lazily overhead, a visual shorthand for existential ennui that feels about as subtle as a brick through a stained glass window. Then there is the sound design, which commits the cardinal sin of recycling the exact same acoustic piano cue every single time a character has an introspective moment, an editorial tic that quickly turns from atmospheric to mildly irritating by the forty-minute mark. You start counting the seconds between piano drops. It is a small thing, but it bugged me, dragging down scenes that might have otherwise worked if the director had simply trusted the actors to carry the emotional weight without being prodded by a melancholy soundtrack that refuses to shut up. There is a looseness to the cutting in the middle act that suggests nobody quite knew where to trim the fat, leading to entire dialogue scenes that circle the drain of their own premise without ever landing a clean narrative punch.

The thematic architecture of the piece rests on the old chestnut that human connection can be found in the unlikeliest of places, but it frames this realization through such a middle-class, metropolitan lens that it frequently feels insular to a fault. Raghav and Madhu wander around a mostly deserted Mumbai—an aesthetic choice that feels more like the production couldn't afford extras than a deliberate artistic statement about urban isolation—and talk about compromise and missed opportunities while avoiding anything resembling genuine danger or consequence. It lacks the raw, bruising observational accuracy of something like Mani Kaul's Uski Roti or even the sharper mainstream compromises of a mid-career Hrishikesh Mukherjee picture, floating instead in that awkward middle tier of Hindi movies where ambition vastly outstrips execution. The characters keep referencing books they are reading and films they have seen as a way of establishing their interior lives, a screenwriting crutch that always feels like the authors are telling you how smart their creations are instead of showing you through action.

By the time the central pair finally part ways at a suburban train station with the sort of muted acceptance that passes for closure in this kind of cinema, you are left with the distinct impression of having spent two hours in a waiting room with two polite strangers who occasionally talked too loudly about their marriage problems. It isn't a disaster, exactly, because Chhaya and Bose are too skilled to let their scenes completely sink into the mud of bad dialogue, but it lacks the necessary pulse to justify its own existence as a theatrical release. There are moments where the camera catches a genuine flash of domestic cruelty or the strange, accidental intimacy that can spring up between two exhausted people sharing a cup of bad tea, and for those brief seconds, the picture almost manages to justify its own sluggish momentum. But then a character will launch into another long speech about finding oneself, or the piano music will cue up again to remind you that you are watching an indie drama about urban loneliness, and the spell snaps immediately. You leave the theater thinking about nothing in particular, except perhaps whether that wool jacket Bose wore was genuinely itchy under studio lights, which is probably not the kind of lingering resonance the filmmakers were hoping for when they set out to make a mature romance about modern loneliness.