The sound design during the bicycle race in Yaariyan is just flat-out weird, like someone recorded a chain skipping off a sprocket in an empty garage and decided to run it through three separate plugins just to make sure you couldn't ignore it. If I'm honest, it sets a bizarrely cheap tone right out of the gate, long before any of the actual plot mechanics have even bothered to introduce themselves. Divya Khosla Kumar took the reins for this mess, and while the woman clearly watched a lot of Karan Johar projects growing up, she somehow missed the memo about pacing being an actual thing that directors need to worry about. The screenplay feels stitched together from discarded pages of three different campus dramas that never quite figured out what decade they wanted to inhabit. You get hazing rituals that look like they were conceived by someone whose only reference point for college life was a secondary school brochure, followed immediately by heavy emotional breakdowns shot against sunsets that have been cranked up in post-production until the orange hues start bleeding right out of the monitor. It's a lot to sit through, especially when the characters are constantly shouting about friendship while treating each other with the casual cruelty usually reserved for rival cartel bosses.

Himansh Kohli wanders through the center of all this noise with the vacant expression of a guy who just realized he left his oven on back home. He is supposed to be the anchor, the brooding hero carrying the weight of a dead father and a troubled peer group, but he mostly just stands there staring at the middle distance with his jaw clenched so tight you worry about his dental health. It's an interesting contrast when you think back to Shahid Kapoor's frantic, sweaty energy in Ishq Vishk, where at least you felt like something was happening behind the eyes. Here, the camera loves Kohli so much it forgets to give him anything playable, lingering on his profile during dramatic silences that drag on until the audience starts shifting uncomfortably in their seats. Then you have Gulshan Grover, who shows up as a stern principal and manages to chew on the scenery with such fierce dedication that you almost forgive the fact that his dialogue sounds like it was translated from a completely different script by someone who didn't speak fluent Hindi. Deepti Naval pops in occasionally as the wise mother figure, bringing a quiet dignity that feels entirely unearned by the nonsense happening around her, yet she plays the scenes anyway because she's a professional who apparently needed the payday or simply lost a very long bet.

The supporting cast features Serah Singh, Dev Sharma, and Rakul Preet Singh, all of whom are gorgeous in that hyper-filtered way common to modern Bollywood movies where pores apparently don't exist. Rakul Preet actually manages to squeeze out a moment of genuine charm during a motorcycle ride sequence, cutting through the synthetic gloss with a sharp grin that suggests she might have survived a better film if the editing room hadn't chopped her best reactions down to single frames. The cinematography by Sameer Arya leans heavily into drone shots of Australian beaches and university greens that look remarkably like they were rented by the hour, creating a strange visual disconnect where the background is trying to sell you a tourism board pamphlet while the foreground is stuck in a dreary melodrama about land rights and ancestral honor. It is a very loud film, driven by a soundtrack that treats every minor emotional realization like the climax of an action epic. Songs pile on top of each other with zero breathing room, crashing into dialogue scenes that were already struggling to make basic narrative sense.

There is an entire subplot involving environmental activism that apparently exists just to give the characters something righteous to do when they aren't busy staging elaborate beach volleyball tournaments or breaking hearts in slow motion. It treats corporate greed with the sophisticated nuance of a high school debate team pamphlet, complete with mustache-twirling developers who want to pave over a pristine stretch of sand for a golf course. This moral panic sits very uneasily next to the twenty-minute stretches where the narrative completely abandons the plot to focus on choreographed dance numbers shot in neon-drenched clubs that wouldn't look out of place in a mid-tier Punjabi pop video. Hindi cinema has always had a complicated relationship with escapism, but usually, the glossy surface tension serves some deeper emotional arc about family or ambition. Yaariyan just uses the gloss as a shield against any actual character development, hoping that if the drone flies fast enough over the water, nobody will notice that the dialogue makes zero logical sense from one scene to the next.

What lingers after the credits finally stop rolling is not the supposed tragedy of the narrative arc or the triumphant resolution of the big campus competition, but rather the sheer exhaustion of watching so many attractive people run around in matching blazers while pretending to care about trees. It's a long haul, occupying a strange space in the landscape of contemporary romantic dramas where every emotional beat feels manufactured by a focus group that watched three YouTube compilations of tearjerker scenes and decided to mash them together without an edit log. You find yourself focusing on tiny, irrelevant details instead of the plot, like the way one extra in the background of the cafeteria scene is eating a completely dry bagel for four consecutive minutes of screen time. The movie never earns its runtime, and it certainly never earns the sweeping emotional swells it keeps trying to force down your throat through sheer volume and aggressive color grading. You just leave the theater blinking against the real world, wondering why anyone thought this particular group of troubled youth needed two hours and twenty minutes to sort out their daddy issues.