Khushalii Kumar clears her throat at least four times in the first twenty minutes of Starfish just to signal she is distressed, which is an acting choice that I still can't quite get behind. That might sound like a petty place to start a review of a romantic drama set against the backdrop of deep-sea diving, but when a film asks you to buy into aquatic peril and psychological unravelling simultaneously, those little sonic tics matter more than the sweeping crane shots. Hindi movies have long had this weird relationship with the ocean, usually treating it as a painted backdrop or a musical playground where stars can splash around in chiffon sarees without getting their hair properly soaked, so credit where it is due for actually putting salt water on screen. The trouble is that putting water on screen and making that water feel heavy, dangerous, and emotionally resonant are two entirely separate production hurdles, and director Akhil Sahani seems to have cleared the first one while occasionally tripping over his own fins on the second.

The screenplay, adapted from a book by Sourabh Mukherjee, lurches forward with the structural grace of a cargo ship taking on water during a typhoon. Characters explain their trauma through dialogue that feels like it was translated from an entirely different emotional language, standing on scenic docks while delivering lines about grief as if they are reading warning labels on heavy machinery. You get scenes that start in media res with zero geographic orientation, cutting from a noisy nightclub in Mumbai to a silent underwater cave off the coast of Malta without giving the audience's ears a second to adjust to the pressure drop. It is messy, sure, but it is a messy kind of ambitious that you rarely see in standard-issue Bollywood romantic thrillers where the formula has been smoothed down to a marble slab. Ehan Bhat wanders through these choppy narrative waters looking profoundly confused, which honestly might be the most appropriate performance choice available to him given the script he was handed.

Milind Soman shows up in a wetsuit with a graying beard and an aura of supreme exhaustion that suggests he signed onto this project primarily for a nice working holiday by the Mediterranean. He plays a veteran diver with secrets, naturally, and he delivers his lines with that specific brand of gravelly stoicism that works wonders until a close-up forces him to emote during a confrontation scene. There is a moment near the middle where he and Kumar are supposed to be having this crackling, high-tension argument about a drowning incident from their past, but the sound design pushes the background waves so high that half their dialogue gets swallowed by the swell. If I'm honest, I spent most of that sequence staring at a weirdly shaped scar on Soman's shoulder and wondering if it was prosthetic or real because the lighting made it look like a piece of chewed-up bubblegum stuck to his skin. Tusharr Khanna fares a bit better simply by keeping his mouth shut and looking brooding near the perimeter of the frame, channeling some of that moody energy Vivek Oberoi used to bring to mid-budget thrillers back in the early noughties.

Visually, the film is a strange beast that oscillates between looking like an expensive tourism board commercial and a washed-out YouTube travel vlog. The underwater cinematography by Anil Chandel has real moments of hypnotic beauty, particularly when the camera tracks a diver moving through a sun-dappled shipwreck where the rust looks like flaky pastry crust. Then the film cuts back to dry land and suddenly the color grading goes haywire, throwing these aggressive teal tints over actors' faces until everyone looks like they have mild jaundice. The soundtrack leans heavily into ambient electronic drones that occasionally swell into full-blown orchestral melodrama whenever someone stares pensively out a porthole. It gets repetitive fast, especially that one recurring piano motif that plays every single time Kumar remembers her mother, which happens about once every ten minutes like clockwork.

Beneath the aquatic thriller mechanics, the story wants to be about personal redemption and the terror of facing your own repressed memories, themes that feel a bit like borrowed clothes in a movie that spends this much time focusing on scuba gear specs. Kumar's character isn't just diving for fun or work; she is chasing ghosts at the bottom of the ocean floor, though the film struggles to make that internal compulsion visible in her actual body language. When she is above water, she tends to slouch and stare at her fingernails, but the moment she puts on the oxygen mask and slips beneath the surface, she transforms into a focused professional who moves with clean, deliberate strokes. That discrepancy between land-bound soap opera and aquatic survival drama is where Starfish ultimately stalls out, never quite figuring out how to connect the woman sobbing in a damp hotel room to the diver navigating a pitch-black underwater tunnel without hyperventilating.

There is a supporting actress who plays Kumar's roommate in a coastal town, and her voice-dubbing is so egregiously out of sync with her mouth movements during a kitchen argument that I actually rewound the digital screener just to make sure my laptop wasn't lagging. It's a small thing, but it bugged me for the rest of the scene because once you notice a boom mic shadow or an obvious ADR mismatch, the illusion of reality evaporates completely. Starfish asks for a lot of suspension of disbelief, not just regarding the physics of deep-sea decompression sickness, but regarding human behavior in grief, and those tiny technical glitches make it that much harder to stay on board. Still, you can't accuse the production of playing it completely safe, even if its biggest swings usually end with the camera pointing awkwardly at a fake-looking coral reef while the lead actors shout their feelings over the sound of artificial bubbles.

Khushalii Kumar carries the bulk of this weight on her shoulders, and while her performance lacks the raw, bruising impact of an actor who completely loses herself in a role, she keeps the narrative from drifting entirely out to sea. She has a grounded screen presence that saves some of the more preposterous plot twists from becoming outright laughable, even if she looks visibly relieved whenever a scene ends and she gets to take that heavy rubber regulator out of her mouth. The movie doesn't reinvent the wheel, and it certainly won't change how streaming platforms handle mid-tier genre exercises, but it occupies a weird, murky space that makes it difficult to dismiss entirely. You leave the theater or close the tab with a mild headache from all the underwater pressure changes and acoustic feedback, wondering why everyone in the film had to whisper their secrets instead of just talking like normal people.

The closing stretch abandons all pretense of subtlety and throws three major revelations at the viewer in the span of five minutes, resulting in a narrative pile-up that leaves everybody gasping for air. Soman gives a final speech about letting go of the past while standing on a pier at twilight, and the lighting is so gorgeous that you almost forgive the thoroughly predictable dialogue he has been handed to recite. Khanna stands nearby looking sympathetic in a knitted sweater that looks entirely too warm for a tropical beach setting, and then the credits roll over a generic power ballad that sounds like every other end-title track currently floating around the industry. It's an abrupt stop to a journey that felt both overly long and strangely weightless, leaving the audience stranded on the shoreline with nothing to do but shake the sand out of their shoes.