There is a specific kind of low-stakes panic that settles in when a secondary character in a mid-budget Hindi film has clearly been dubbed by someone standing two inches away from a cheap USB microphone in a completely different room, and Chhatriwali welcomes you into its world with precisely that brand of acoustic detachment about four minutes before the opening credits even manage to crawl up the side of the screen. If I'm honest, it's a small thing that bugged me right out of the gate, setting a slightly twitchy baseline for a movie that desperately wants you to relax into its socially conscious sitcom rhythms. You sit there in the dark watching an extra move their jaw with entirely different timing than the booming voice emerging from the center channel, and suddenly you are hyper-aware of every single post-production seam in the entire enterprise. It is a messy way to start a picture about public health and sexual education in small-town Haryana, though perhaps fitting for a project that frequently trips over its own earnest shoelaces while trying to sprint toward a moral high ground.

Tejas Prabha Vijay Deoskar directs with the visual flair of a prime-time television soap opera that occasionally remembers it was granted a theatrical aspect ratio, keeping the camera locked in medium-two-shots while characters debate the merits of contraception over steaming cups of chai. The screenplay by Sanchit Gupta and Gayatri Gilada relies heavily on broad farce and aggressively telegraphed misunderstandings, treating the subject of condoms with the wide-eyed shock value of a naughty middle-schooler who just learned what the word anatomy means, which feels exhausting about twenty minutes in when you realize how much narrative mileage they plan to extract from people whispering the word nirobi in crowded pharmacies. There is an unmistakable stiffness to the way scenes transition from domestic interiors to sun-drenched street corners, as if every single blocking decision was made by committee during a particularly tense Zoom call.

Rakul Preet Singh stars as Sanya, a chemistry tutor who takes a job at a local condom factory out of sheer desperation and ends up becoming an accidental crusader for sexual literacy among the local youth, playing the role with a steady, unshakeable earnestness that occasionally saves the material from its own worst impulses. She isn't doing the frantic, scenery-chewing heavy lifting that Kareena Kapoor brought to a vaguely similar tonal balancing act in Good Newwz, choosing instead to anchor the chaos with straight-faced reactions to men who treat rubber prophylactics like hazardous medical waste. Yet the writing rarely gives her room to breathe, forcing her into endless expositional monologues where she has to lecture crowds of sweating local youths about consent and biology as if she were reading directly from a state-board textbook while standing on a stage.

The supporting cast features the late Satish Kaushik in one of his final onscreen appearances, anchoring the paternal warmth of the town with the kind of lived-in, effortless charm that makes you acutely aware of how much the current commercial landscape is going to miss his presence, even when he is saddled with dialogue that belongs in a public service announcement pamphlet rather than a feature film. Sumeet Vyas plays her husband with a simmering, fragile masculinity that feels authentic to the specific brand of small-town patriarchal insecurity the script wants to dismantle, though his sudden turnaround in the third act happens so fast you could almost miss it if you blinked during a scene change. Rakesh Bedi pops up as a baffled local chemist who treats every box of contraceptives like a clandestine shipment of contraband plutonium, milking every single double entendre for whatever marginal value it still holds after being recycled through three decades of television comedies.

Visually, the film looks like it was lit by someone who discovered a ring light on sale and decided to use it as the sole illumination source for every indoor conversation, casting harsh, flat shadows across pastel-painted walls that look suspiciously like temporary set pieces built on a soundstage in suburban Mumbai. The soundtrack by an eclectic committee of composers drops generic, mid-tempo romantic numbers into narrative spaces where they make precisely zero narrative sense, grinding the already creaky pacing to an absolute halt so that Rakul Preet Singh can change into her sixth pastel-shaded Kurti of the sequence while dancing through a wheat field that looks terribly digital. There is a recurring musical sting that plays every single time a character looks at a box of condoms with mild terror, and by the fourth or fifth repetition of that exact sonic cue, you begin to wonder if the sound editor simply gave up and put it on a continuous loop.

Bollywood has a long and complicated history of using broad comedy as a Trojan horse for social messaging, stretching all the way back through the decades to earnest social dramas that wore their educational intentions on their sleeves, but Chhatriwali struggles to find the delicate balance between lecture and entertainment that made films like Pad Man actually work as dramatic narratives. It treats its audience with a strange sort of condescension, assuming that the mere mention of anatomical terms is inherently hilarious or groundbreaking, while simultaneously watering down the real-world obstacles faced by female educators in conservative heartlands into neat, palatable plot points that can be neatly resolved before the final reel. The film wants desperately to be a conversation starter, but the conversation it inspires mostly revolves around why nobody bothered to fix the lighting in the pharmacy scenes or why the background score feels like it was lifted from a stock audio library.

There is something deeply frustrating about watching a project with such genuinely good intentions trip over its own mechanics at almost every turn, because the core message about reproductive health and the destigmatization of safe sex in Hindi movies is undeniably crucial and long overdue. You can feel the sweat of the screenwriters trying to make a taboo subject accessible to family audiences without offending the sensibilities of conservative censors, and that constant compromise drains away whatever sharp satirical edge the premise might have possessed in a writer's room that wasn't terrified of a lower-middle-class backlash. The pacing collapses entirely in the middle stretch as Sanya faces a series of remarkably low-stakes community protests that are resolved through the power of a single, well-delivered speech rather than any structural change in the local attitude. By the time the closing credits arrive, you are left wishing the filmmakers had possessed half the courage of their protagonist, opting instead for a safe, sanitized conclusion that plays it right down the middle.