The sound design in the opening ten minutes of Aiyyaa makes a strange clicking noise every time the camera pans past a plastic water cooler, which I couldn't stop noticing even after the plot kicked in. Sachin Kundalkar directs this chaotic piece of cinema with the frantic energy of someone trying to explain a fever dream while the bus is pulling away, throwing animation, split screens, and direct-to-camera asides at the audience with almost alarming abandon. If I'm honest, the first half hour is an absolute slog of manic editing choices that seem designed to induce mild vertigo rather than establish tone. You have Meenakshi, played by Rani Mukerji with her eyes perpetually widened in a mix of romantic yearning and mild annoyance, living in a household that functions at a permanent volume of eleven. Her father sits on the porch surrounded by caged birds he refuses to let out, coughing into a handkerchief while drinking endless cups of milky tea, while her mother and grandmother bicker constantly over household expenses and the proper way to fry fish.

Then Surya enters the frame and the movie shifts gears into something much stranger and considerably more interesting, largely because Prithviraj plays him like an ancient marble statue dropped into a suburban transit strike. He doesn't have dialogue for the first forty minutes, which is a bold choice for a romantic lead in mainstream Hindi movies, relying entirely on posture, slow blinks, and the way he stands motionless in the middle of a crowded art college corridor while everyone else scrambles past him with portfolios and damp hair. Meenakshi smells him before she sees him, an olfactory obsession that triggers elaborate musical fantasies involving giant velvet cushions and dramatic wind machines, turning her mundane existence as a librarian into a sensory overload. The choreography in these sequences pulls from all over the place, mashing up classical temple postures with modern pelvic thrusts that feel distinctly unhinged, especially when she’s wearing a heavily sequined pink ghagra in the middle of a dingy municipal office.

Amey Wagh pops up as the prospective groom her parents have lined up, a man named Nana who eats onions like apples and talks about his investments in commercial real estate with terrifying enthusiasm. It’s a performance that avoids the usual broad caricatures found in mid-budget comedies, giving us a guy who is genuinely repulsive in his domestic habits yet somehow entirely convinced of his own irresistible charm. He dominates the second act with his greasy hair and damp handshakes, making you cringe every time he enters a room. Yet the film keeps pulling back to Meenakshi’s inner life, her bizarre daydreams where she dances in slow motion while burning incense sticks and rolling her eyes back into her head. Nirmiti Sawant plays the mother with a wonderful weariness, shouting instructions from the kitchen while chopping vegetables with enough force to splinter the wooden board beneath them, anchoring the domestic chaos in something recognizable even when the plot spirals off into surrealist tangents.

Amit Trivedi’s music score does heavy lifting here, sliding from traditional lavani beats into greasy synthesizer basslines that feel plucked straight out of a cheap 1980s thriller. Yet there is this one recurring brass cue that sounds like a kazoo being blown underwater, and it repeats so often during the transition scenes that I started wanting to throw things at the projection booth. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me. The cinematography by Amalendu Chaudhary captures the dusty, over-lit interiors of working-class Marathi households with a fidelity that feels almost cruel, showing every grease stain on the wallpaper and every frayed edge of the sofa cover without softening the blow for the sake of cinematic aesthetics. You can practically smell the stale frying oil and wet cement.

Where the film loses its footing is in the way it handles Meenakshi's obsession with Surya's physical scent, treating it as both a feminist awakening and a punchline without ever quite deciding which one it actually wants to commit to. We’ve seen stranger premises in regional cinema, but Kundalkar seems hesitant to push the envelope all the way into actual transgression, pulling back just as things get genuinely weird to insert another broad family argument about marriage proposals. It shares some DNA with the quirky suburban anarchy of Khosla Ka Ghosla, though without that film’s sharp structural discipline or steady grip on narrative pacing. Characters wander in and out of scenes simply because the script needs someone to react to Meenakshi’s latest bizarre monologue about body odors and art school pretension, leaving whole subplots hanging in the air like smoke from an unlit cigarette. The editing gets particularly sloppy around the midpoint, dropping reaction shots that linger a full second longer than they should, killing the comedic timing of lines that were already struggling under the weight of too much exposition.

Mukerji carries the entire enterprise on her shoulders, pitching her performance somewhere between a classic heroine and a manic cartoon character who has accidentally wandered into a kitchen sink drama. Her comic timing remains razor-sharp, particularly when she’s silently judging her brother for spending his afternoons painting bad portraits of stray dogs or listening to her father complain about his liver. There's a particular scene where she tries to seduce Surya by standing entirely motionless in the rain outside his workshop, and her face goes through about twelve distinct micro-expressions in the span of four seconds without a single word escaping her lips. It’s a masterclass in silent reaction that almost makes up for the half hour of toilet humor that preceded it. Hindi films rarely give female leads this much room to be genuinely ridiculous, messy, and driven by base physical impulses rather than noble self-sacrifice, and watching her tear into the role is worth the structural mess surrounding her.

By the time the narrative stumbles toward its rushed resolution, involving a stray dog and a misunderstanding at a bus stop, you realize the movie hasn't actually arrived anywhere at all. It just stops. The credits roll over a reprise of the main theme song while the camera pans across empty desks and discarded paintbrushes, leaving you to wonder what any of it was supposed to mean for Meenakshi’s future career prospects or her family's debt. It isn't a disaster, but it isn't quite the subversive comedy it desperately wants to be either. It’s just sitting there on the screen, a weird, sweaty artifact of a phase in commercial filmmaking when directors were briefly allowed to throw whatever nonsense they wanted at the wall and see what stuck to the plaster.