The transition lens on Vinod Khanna’s first close-up in Tell Me O Kuda feels like it was lifted straight from an eighties soap opera, sliding across the frame with an oily sort of reluctance. If I’m honest, that single optical choice tells you almost everything you need to know about the visual texture of the enterprise, which often mistakes nostalgia for actual atmosphere. We are asked to buy into a grand, sweeping narrative about paternity, roots, and identity, yet the physical reality of the film keeps pulling your attention toward things that are mildly irritating, like a supporting actor whose dialogue sounds like it was looped in a damp cupboard three weeks after the shoot wrapped.

Hema Malini’s direction carries the unmistakable weight of a vanity project designed primarily to anchor her daughter’s career revival, and that agenda leaks into every scene. Esha Deol plays Tanya, a young woman who discovers she is adopted and immediately sets out across the globe to track down her three biological fathers, a premise that requires a very specific kind of narrative suspension of disbelief. Deol throws herself into the physical demands of the role with an earnest, sweaty tenacity, running across desert dunes and weeping openly in crowded European railway stations. Her performance lacks the effortless, lived-in cadence that someone like Tabu brought to similar emotional terrain in Astitva, opting instead for a loud, declamatory style of grief that feels constantly tuned to the back row of a cheap single-screen theater. She hits her emotional beats with the precision of a carpenter driving nails into dry pine, functional and loud, though rarely surprising.

The supporting cast of fathers is where the production gets genuinely bizarre, bringing together three titans of older hindi films to play off a newcomer who is visibly struggling to hold the center. Dharmendra, Vinod Khanna, and Rishi Kapoor occupy the corners of Tanya’s journey like monuments that have been dragged into a suburban backyard. They each get their own designated emotional arc, trotted out one by one as the narrative grinds through its checklist of paternal reconciliation. Kapoor brings a certain cranky warmth to his sequences that temporarily masks the thinness of the dialogue, while Khanna relies on that weathered, slow-burning gaze that worked so well for him back in the day. Dharmendra, meanwhile, is mostly asked to look misty-eyed against various backdrops while uttering lines about destiny and bloodlines that sound like they were translated from a badly photocopied paperback.

There is a recurring musical cue that swells up every single time Tanya remembers her adoptive parents, a screeching violin line that repeats so often it starts to feel like a minor form of psychological harassment. The soundtrack overall belongs to a strange, transitional era of bollywood music production, caught awkwardly between the grand melodic traditions of the nineties and the glossy, electronic crunch of modern hindi movies. Songs appear out of nowhere, dragging the narrative to a screeching halt so that people can dance in front of European landmarks that look suspiciously like digital backdrops. The camera work during these sequences frequently loses its mind, swirling around the actors with crane shots that seem designed exclusively to make the audience slightly carsick.

Beneath the melodramatic surface, the screenplay is fundamentally obsessed with the idea of ownership disguised as affection. Tanya’s quest is framed as an act of self-discovery, yet every father she meets seems to view her primarily as a blank ledger upon which they can write their own redemption. The film never pauses to question whether these men have any actual right to disrupt her life simply because of shared DNA, preferring instead to wallow in the warm bath of traditional family values. It’s a conservative, deeply old-fashioned view of human connection that feels increasingly out of step with how contemporary audiences navigate relationships. Even the international locations—Turkey, Rajasthan, Thailand—feel less like living places and more like postcard-stamped waiting rooms where emotional breakthroughs are scheduled to occur at precisely two-minute intervals.

Arjan Aujla and Sudhanshu Pandey pop up in the margins as romantic interests and obstacles, though both actors are given so little actual character development that they mostly function as animated coat racks for sharply tailored suits. Pandey handles his scenes with a slick, professional detachment, while Aujla occasionally looks like he wandered onto the wrong set and decided to just stay for craft services. Their presence highlights the broader structural problem of the screenplay, which treats every secondary character as a disposable prop meant to propel Tanya closer to her inevitable, tear-soaked destiny on a windy mountaintop. By the time the final confrontation arrives, with all three fathers standing in a triangular formation to dispense pearls of paternal wisdom, the emotional well has been pumped entirely dry.

You can see the gears turning behind every single frame, a mechanical grinding of plot points that leaves no room for accidental beauty or genuine surprise. The editing relies far too heavily on reaction shots that linger for one beat too long, deadening the comedic timing and draining the dramatic tension out of arguments that should crackle with real urgency. It’s a production that wants desperately to be remembered as an emotional epic about belonging, but it ultimately settles for being a long, exhausting parade of famous faces reading lines off an imaginary teleprompter. There is nothing here that hasn't been done with significantly more grace in a dozen older melodramas, leaving the whole endeavor to drift away from memory the moment the screen goes black.