There is a specific kind of background score cue in Pyaar Mein Twist that plays whenever Rishi Kapoor looks at a potted plant on his balcony, and if I am honest, it drove me quietly insane by the twentieth minute. It is not great, not bad, just there, scraping against the nerves with the persistence of a loose thread on a woolen sweater. Hindi cinema has spent decades treating senior citizens as either saints wrapped in white khadi or punchlines who drop their teeth at dinner, so seeing a modest little middle-of-the-road picture try to carve out a romantic space for two people who remember black-and-white television feels almost transgressive on paper. Yet the film itself rarely leans into that potential transgression, preferring instead to coast on the comfortable charisma of its leads while the plot gently idles in neutral. Direction comes from Hrishikesh Mukherjee disciples who clearly watched Anand one too many times and forgot to steal the pacing. Scenes stretch out until the actors are forced to invent business with teacups and sofa cushions just to stay occupied in the frame. The screenplay is structured like a sitcom pilot that forgot to get picked up, offering up a gallery of disapproving adult children who treat their parents' late-life companionship as a personal tax audit. We have seen this narrative machinery creak into motion in dozens of other projects over the years, though rarely with quite this level of domestic beige.

Rishi Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia together carry an effortless chemistry that belongs to an entirely different lineage of Hindi films, reminding anyone paying attention of what Bobby felt like before the industry got obsessed with abs and algorithm-tested overseas markets. Kapoor plays Yash Khurana with a slightly rumpled resignation, shuffling through his widowed routine with the precise boredom of a retired bureaucrat who measures his life in newspaper crosswords. Kapadia brings a sharper edge as Sheetal Verma, refusing to play the standard-issue sacrificial mother who knits sweaters by the window while waiting for her grandchildren to call. When they share the screen, the picture briefly remembers it has a pulse, sparking into life during small domestic arguments over property deeds and evening walks. They negotiate their mutual loneliness with sidelong glances and cautious pauses that suggest years of prior wear and tear, far more convincing than the glossy misunderstandings manufactured by the secondary characters. Soha Ali Khan and Samir Dattani pop up as the offspring tasked with policing this romance, and their performances hit the screen with the dull thud of a badly dubbed regional soap opera broadcast on a Tuesday afternoon. Khan’s dialogue delivery carries that specific, clipped upper-crust irritation common to modern metropolitan dramas, while Dattani mostly exists to stand in hallways with his arms crossed and look mildly betrayed by the concept of inheritance law.

Cinematographer Ravi K. Chandran was nowhere near this production, and you can feel his absence in every flat, overlit interior that looks like an open-plan kitchen showroom in suburban Mumbai. The lighting decisions appear to have been made by someone whose primary aesthetic reference point is a corporate seminar on office productivity, bleaching all the warmth out of Mumbai's winter afternoons. Sound design fares little better, frequently dropping ambient street noise entirely whenever two characters start talking in a park, leaving them stranded in an unnatural acoustic vacuum that makes every line reading sound like it was recorded in a carpeted closet. Then there is the soundtrack, which arrives courtesy of Jatin-Lalit working on autopilot during a rainy Tuesday, churning out melodies that dissolve from memory the second the track changes. It is curious how an industry built around musical expression can treat background scoring as such an afterthought, slapping generic accordion tracks onto emotional turning points as if hoping nobody will notice the emotional math doesn't add up. Bollywood movies have historically used songs to externalize what characters cannot say aloud, yet here the tracks feel like commercial breaks inserted into a conversation between two people trying to figure out how to share a mortgage.

The thematic architecture of the movie rests entirely on the radical notion that sixty-year-olds might still possess sweat glands and unresolved daddy issues. Society demands that elderly widows and widowers retire from desire entirely, turning themselves into living monuments of grief for the benefit of their ungrateful progeny. Yash and Sheetal have to sneak around their own grown children to share a cup of coffee, a dynamic that plays as broad comedy but reveals something rather grim about urban family dynamics in contemporary India. The script occasionally stumbles toward genuine social observation regarding real estate pressures and the emotional extortion of the nuclear family unit, but it always pulls back before things get genuinely uncomfortable. Instead of pushing these characters into the messy realities of merging two distinct domestic histories late in life, the narrative resorts to manufactured misunderstandings involving lost letters and timely medical scares. It is a shame, because a sharper version of this story might have examined the economic vulnerability of senior citizens who depend on their children for shelter, but the filmmakers prefer to keep the stakes safely restricted to who gets to sit in the favorite armchair.

There is an awkward sequence near the end where Kapoor and Kapadia dance at a wedding reception, and the extras in the background look so profoundly bored by the choreography that you can practically see them checking their watches for local train timings. It encapsulates the overall viewing experience, which requires a mild form of stamina to get through without reaching for a phone to check emails. By refusing to commit fully to either broad farce or bitter-pill social drama, the picture remains stranded in that vast, gray wasteland of middle-tier cinema where nothing terribly offensive happens, but nothing sticks to your ribs either. The final scene resolves itself through a series of hasty concessions that make very little practical sense for characters who spent two hours establishing how stubborn they are. Kapadia gives a small, weary nod as the credits start to climb, and you are left remembering the way her shoulders dropped in the second scene before the plot mechanics took over and ruined the view.