Kunal Kapoor pronounces the word London with just enough of a pinched nasal stretch that you can tell he spent years trying to scrub his Punjab off before he had to drag it back through customs in a cardboard box. That tiny vocal choice sits right at the start of Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana and if I'm honest it is the only thing that kept me from checking my phone during the first fifteen minutes when the exposition is coming at you like gravel thrown at a greenhouse. You have Omi Khurana running from British bookies who probably collect debts with broken cricket bats, tumbling back into his ancestral village of Lalton with nothing in his pockets except a lie about working for Jamie Oliver. Hindi films usually love a prodigal son returning to wash his sins in mustard oil, but Samir Sharma avoids the soft-focus glow that directors usually smear over the pind to make urban audiences nostalgic for tubewells and cow dung. The dust looks real here, or at least gritty enough to get in your teeth, clinging to the wool of cheap cardigans and settling into the creases of old man Khurana’s neck as he sits on his charpoy complaining about his bowels. The screenplay by Sumit Batheja and the director operates on the assumption that if you throw enough eccentric uncles and burnt parathas at the screen, people will forgive the fact that the actual plot machinery is held together with old chewing gum and prayer. Omi isn't looking for redemption when he lands in Punjab; he is just hiding from guys who want to peel his fingernails off with pliers, which gives his scenes an acidic little kick that prevents the whole thing from sliding into the usual sticky molasses of family reunion dramas. There is a moment where Rajesh Sharma, playing the perpetually aggrieved uncle Titu, drops a plastic bucket onto the concrete floor of the courtyard, and the sound design leaves it ringing just a beat too long before anyone speaks, a minor editing choice that creates a strange, hollow dead air in the middle of a screaming match.

That dead air is everywhere in the middle stretch where the narrative gets lost trying to find the missing recipe for the titular chicken dish, which the family patriarch took to his grave like a nuclear launch code. The recipe isn't just food, obviously, but a MacGuffin coated in grease and cardamom, and everyone from the local butcher to the village drunk wants a piece of the magic that made the Khurana dhaba famous before Omi ruined the family name by stealing gold biscuits from a local MLA. Kunal Kapoor plays him with a slight slouch that suggests a man who has slept in train stations more than once, his eyes darting toward every exit even while he is pretending to stir a pot of boiling milk with a wooden paddle that looks heavy enough to kill a goat. He doesn't have the broad, sweating bluster of typical leading men in this sort of rustic caper, leaning instead into a kind of exhausted petulance that feels closer to what actual thieves look like when they get caught. Opposite him, Huma Qureshi as Harman has to do an awful lot of heavy lifting with very little dialogue, mostly consisting of her glaring from doorframes while holding bundles of spinach or looking at Omi with the specific, hardened disappointment of a woman who watched the boy she used to like turn into a liability with a bad haircut. Her performance in the scenes where she has to pretend she isn't still carrying a torch for this idiot relies entirely on the way she drops her chin and stops blinking, refusing to give him the satisfaction of an easy smile. It is a performance that reminds you of how good she was in Gangs of Wasseypur, bringing that same grounded, no-nonsense weight to a movie that often threatens to turn into a cartoon about turbaned simpletons shouting at each other across courtyards. Yet the camera keeps cutting away from her to follow the various male characters as they concoct absurd schemes to steal spices or bribe municipal inspectors, which feels like a waste of her specific gravity.

Amit Trivedi’s score does something strange to the pacing, dropping these heavy, moody guitar riffs over scenes of old men arguing about property lines in a way that feels like someone dropped a David Fincher soundtrack into a kitchen comedy about poultry. It works better than it has any right to, mostly because the cinematography by Sneha Khanwalkar and Vikas Sivaraman refuses to use the bright, primary-color saturation that usually makes modern Bollywood movies look like they were graded by a fruit vendor. The night scenes are genuinely dark, lit by the yellow glare of single naked bulbs hanging over wooden tables where men smoke bidis and talk about land prices with the casual cruelty of people who have known each other since they were wearing shorts. There is a texture to the grease on the walls and the frayed edges of the mattresses that tells you someone actually looked at a real Punjabi homestead instead of just recreating one on a soundstage in Goregaon. Even so, the editing in the second half starts to stutter, dropping scenes into the middle of nowhere without establishing where characters are coming from, like a stray line of dialogue that was salvaged from the editing room floor and glued back in just to keep the running time over two hours. A scene where Omi tries to buy illegal saffron from a shady chemist in Ludhiana cuts away so abruptly before the bargain is struck that you wonder if a whole reel went missing between the projectionist's hands, leaving a gap where a joke or a punch was supposed to land. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me every time the rhythm hitched right as a conversation was getting somewhere interesting.

The film wants to be about the way families absorb their black sheep without washing them first, but it is much better at being a movie about people who are just tired of being poor and miserable in small towns where everyone knows who owes money to the local seed merchant. The kitchen becomes a battleground not because of culinary passion, but because it is the only asset left that hasn't been mortgaged to a cousin in Canada who sends polaroids of himself standing next to snowblowers. When Omi finally starts cooking, Kapoor doesn't do that ridiculous cinematic thing where the actor pretends to chop onions like a Michelin-starred chef on speed; he fumbles with the knife, he drops garlic cloves on the floor, and he looks genuinely stressed out by the amount of grease smoking up his glasses. That lack of slickness is what keeps the food-obsessed plot from feeling like a tired copy of Anant Mahadevan’s earlier efforts or even a pale shadow of bigger budgeted hindi movies that treat village life like a folk dance performance for tourists. There is an argument to be made that the script spends too much time on the romantic subplot between Omi and Harman, which feels stitched on with thick blue thread because nobody trusted a comedy about a chicken recipe to hold an audience for two hours without someone kissing behind a haystack. The kissing doesn't happen, thankfully, but the longing does, and it gets heavy enough to stall the jokes about old men passing gas and uncles hiding bottles of scotch behind bags of flour. Rajesh Sharma steals every single scene he is in by the simple expedient of looking like he has a migraine that has lasted since the Reagan administration, his voice dropping to a gravelly rasp whenever he has to explain why his share of the restaurant profits went toward buying a tractor that doesn't have an engine.

The secondary characters don't get much room to breathe outside their defining quirks, which is a shame because the ensemble includes actors who usually bring a lot more color to the background of bigger projects. Vipin Sharma pops up as a shady uncle with a greasy ponytail and a gold tooth, but the script gives him nothing to do except hover near doorways and look shifty until he can deliver a punchline about his second wife running off with a plumber from Jalandhar. It's the kind of laziness that creeps into many hindi films when the writers figure the actors can just improvise their way through the dead patches with some local slang and a funny walk. Yet the movie recovers every time it gets back into the kitchen, focusing on the sheer physical labor of making food for people who judge your character by the amount of ghee floating on top of their lentils. The climactic cooking sequence is edited with a frantic, sweaty energy that makes you forget for a few minutes that you already know how this is going to end. Omi isn't redeemed by his cooking; he just manages to make something that doesn't taste like ash, which is about as much absolution as a man of his stripe can expect in a town where the water tastes like old pennies and the electricity goes out twice an hour.