Ajay Dixit pronounces his own name with an elongated, affected swagger that is supposed to convey small-town supremacy, but mostly it just makes you want to slide down in your seat and stare at the exit signs. He’s the kind of guy who maintains two different cell phone covers depending on which circle of acquaintances he’s trying to impress, a detail that feels less like observed character work and more like a screenwriting note that accidentally made it into the final cut. That specific brand of petty superficiality is where Nitesh Tiwari’s Bawaal decides to set up camp for its opening hour, charting the hollow existence of a high school history teacher in Lucknow who treats his actual profession as an inconvenient backdrop to his grand performance of social clout. If I'm honest, the first forty minutes move with that weird, bloated confidence typical of modern mid-budget Hindi movies that forget they need to earn the audience's patience before testing it. Varun Dhawan plays Ajay with a teeth-gritting commitment to his own unlikeliness, strutting through wedding venues and motorcycle showrooms with the frantic energy of someone terrified that the moment he stops moving, everyone will realize he has nothing underneath the leather jacket. It is a performance built entirely out of surfaces, which is sort of the point, except the film spends so much time admiring its own diagnosis of contemporary male insecurity that it starts to feel like an extended lecture delivered by an irritating cousin at a family dinner. Janhvi Kapoor, meanwhile, plays Nisha, his wife of convenience who suffers from severe seizures that are treated by the script less as a medical reality and more as an inconvenient narrative damper designed to lower Ajay's social standing at dinner parties. Kapoor has this habit of playing vulnerability by staring into the middle distance with her lower lip trembling just enough for the key light to catch it, a stylistic choice that belongs in a lesser era of melodramatic cinema, reminding you uncomfortably of Kareena Kapoor Khan’s turn in Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon minus the campy joy of that disaster.

When the narrative abruptly shifts gears and relocates its miserable couple to Europe on a heritage tour funded by Ajay’s panicked attempt to salvage his job after a public brawl, the film loses whatever grounded regional texture it had managed to scrape together in Uttar Pradesh. The screenwriting, credited to a small army of writers including Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari and Piyush Gupta, treats foreign geography like a giant green screen of personal growth where every cobblestone street and preserved railway car exists solely to facilitate a breakthrough for two deeply annoying people who desperately need to log off social media. Parth Siddhpura and Arnob Khan Akib pop up in the periphery as various manifestations of student admiration or skeptical youth, though their main function is to act as passive mirrors reflecting Ajay’s inflated self-image back at him until the mirror inevitably cracks under the weight of his mounting panic. There is an unmistakable stiffness to the way director Nitesh Tiwari stages these European sequences, relying on wide, sun-drenched drone shots that look like promotional material for an upscale travel agency rather than the visual language of a psychological drama about historical empathy. You notice things on a purely technical level that pull you out of the emotional stakes, like how the background extras in Berlin cafes are clearly waiting for a cue or how the sound design occasionally drops ambient street noise the second the lead actors start whispering about their stagnant sex life. It’s a small thing, but the foley work on the luggage wheels during the airport transit scenes sounds like a bowling ball rolling down a hardwood floor, and once you hear it, the illusion of reality is permanently punctured.

The entire middle section of the film hinges on an audacious, wildly controversial thematic pivot where the Holocaust is deployed as a cinematic weight-loss program for a toxic marriage, a narrative choice that has already launched a thousand hot takes across the internet. Walking through Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ajay looks at the piles of suitcases and the gas chambers not with the crushing silence of historical horror, but with the sudden, epiphany-laden realization that maybe he hasn't been a very good husband to Nisha. This is where the filmmaking crosses the line from tone-deaf to genuinely bizarre, flattening mass industrial slaughter into a helpful self-help retreat for an insecure schoolteacher who is worried his friends won't like his Instagram grid anymore. Varun Dhawan delivers his lines inside the camp with a breathless realization that feels completely unearned, as if the script is demanding we applaud him simply for noticing that bad things happened to other people in the past. It’s an approach that recalls the clumsy historical tourism of something like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, where unimaginable trauma is treated as a moral teaching aid for the emotional development of an outsider character who leaves the site of mass murder fundamentally unchanged except for a slightly better attitude toward his spouse. The cinematography by Mitesh Mirchandani suddenly shifts into a heavy, desaturated palette during these sequences, leaning hard on slow-motion tracking shots of weeping actors against stark grey brickwork, praying that the gravity of the location will rub off on a script that is essentially a relationship drama wearing a historical coat.

By the time the couple returns to India, having learned that everyone is fighting their own internal war just like humanity did in the twentieth century, the movie has essentially dissolved into a series of soft-focus apologies and tearful airport reconciliations. Janhvi Kapoor gets a big monologue near the climax where she spells out the film's thesis with the subtlety of a falling piano, leaving zero room for interpretation or ambiguity, which seems to be the primary fear of contemporary Bollywood directors working on streaming-first projects. The background score by Mithoon and Tanishk Bagchi swells at every conceivable moment of emotional realization, drowning out what little subtlety the actors might have found in their pauses and glances. There is a relentless need to explain every single psychological shift out loud, as if the creative team didn't trust the audience to connect the dots between Ajay’s superficial life in Lucknow and his sudden obsession with World War II battlefields. Yet, despite its glaring miscalculations and the sheer audacity of its central metaphor, Bawaal refuses to be completely boring, maintaining a bizarre sort of watchability purely through the magnitude of its own ambition. It’s a messy, overcooked enterprise that aims for the stars and ends up crashing directly into a historical monument, leaving a cloud of dust and a lot of confused tourists in its wake.