Badshah wears a pair of sunglasses indoors during a pivotal emotional confrontation that has absolutely no business featuring eyewear of that magnitude, and if I'm honest, that single accessory choice tells you more about the production's commitment to grounded realism than any script notes ever could.

Bollywood has a long and occasionally exhausting history of taking a social taboos and dressing them up in the bright, garish costumes of broad comedy just to make the medicine go down easier for audiences who might otherwise balk at hearing certain words spoken aloud inside a crowded theater. Shilpi Dasgupta steps into this messy arena with Khandaani Shafakhana, a picture that wants to talk about sex clinics in small-town Punjab without ever actually lingering long enough on the messy, uncomfortable reality of what a woman running that kind of establishment would face from her neighbors, her uncles, and the local police force. The screenplay by Gautam Mehra operates on a logic where every serious conversation must be immediately defused by a wacky misunderstanding involving a misunderstanding about erectile dysfunction medication or a sight gag featuring an awkwardly shaped herbal bottle. It is a strange way to build a comedy, lurching between earnest public service announcements about reproductive health and the kind of broad, frantic physical humor you would expect from a David Dhawan farce circa 1999.

Sonakshi Sinha anchors this chaotic enterprise with a weary, grounded fatigue that occasionally feels entirely disconnected from the nonsense happening around her, playing Baby Bedi as a woman who just wants to pay off her dead uncle's debts and get some sleep. She doesn't lean into the crusading zeal that the character's later speeches demand, which actually works to the movie's advantage because it keeps Baby from turning into an insufferable mouthpiece for the writer's room. When she looks at a prospective client across the counter with a look that clearly communicates she would rather be anywhere else on earth, Sinha finds a genuinely funny deadpan register that reminds you how good she can be when she isn't shouting through melodramatic dialogue. Varun Sharma plays her cousin, and he does the exact same frantic arm-waving routine that made him memorable in Fukrey, except here the bit wears thin about twenty minutes in because the character is given zero narrative arc beyond being perpetually panicked.

Then there is Badshah making his acting debut as a pop star who seeks help at the clinic, and his performance consists largely of standing very still while wearing expensive jackets and reciting his lines in the flat, level tone of a man reading a grocery list off his phone. It is a bafflingly wooden turn, made worse by an editing choice that lingers on his blank reaction shots for a beat or two longer than is comfortable, as if the director was hoping some hidden emotion would eventually materialize on his face through the sheer power of hope. The supporting cast fares slightly better, particularly Kulbhushan Kharbanda in a brief cameo that carries more emotional weight than the entire second act put together, though his scenes are cut short to make room for another musical interlude.

The visual language of the film is aggressively cheerful, soaked in the kind of bright, saturated yellows and greens that suggest a perpetual noon in a Punjabi township that has never actually experienced dust or shadow. Amalendu Chaudhary's cinematography keeps the camera moving in dizzying circles around characters during dialogue scenes, a trick that feels like an attempt to manufacture energy for a scene that has completely run out of narrative momentum. The soundtrack features the mandatory remix of an older Punjabi track that plays twice during the first half hour, and while the beat is catchy enough, hearing the exact same synth drop underscore both a tense family argument and a trip to the local pharmacy gets old fast. Hindi movies have always relied heavily on catchy songs to smooth over rough patches in the narrative, but here the songs often halt the plot dead in its tracks just as Baby is about to confront someone about their deep-seated sexual anxieties.

There is a recurring motif about ancestral duty and breaking generational curses that feels tacked on in the editing suite, as if someone realized twenty minutes before locking the picture that they needed a theme bigger than just running a sex clinic in a patriarchal society. The film wants to champion female autonomy and open communication, yet it constantly relies on the old-fashioned trope of a woman needing the financial blessing of a male relative or the reluctant approval of local patriarchs to validate her enterprise. Every time Baby tries to claim her space, a male character steps in with a loud speech that redirects the audience's attention back to his comic distress, effectively silencing the protagonist in her own movie. It is an odd structural flaw that keeps the film from ever achieving the genuine social satire it clearly thinks it is pulling off.

By the time the third act rolls around with its mandatory courtroom speech about how sex education shouldn't be a shameful secret, the dialogue becomes so stilted and heavy-handed that even Sinha's tired sincerity can't quite save the moment from feeling like an after-school special. Hindi cinema has produced far more daring explorations of human intimacy and social hypocrisy without needing to wrap every single conversation in juvenile double entendres just to keep the front-benchers awake. You leave the theater thinking less about the important conversations the movie claims to have started and more about how distracting Badshah's sunglasses were during that emotional climax, which is probably not what the filmmakers had in mind when they set out to break a taboo.