The ceiling fan in the Indore bedroom has a distinct metallic wobble that I started hearing about five minutes in, and honestly, that sound stayed with me longer than most of the plot points about real estate subsidies and fake divorces. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how the sound design department let that rattle persist through three crucial dramatic turns without ever fixing the mix or explaining if it was just bad acoustics on a built set. We are supposed to believe this lower-middle-class joint family home is bursting at the seams with bodies and grievances, yet the ambient track keeps dropping out whenever Vicky Kaushal starts monologuing about square footage and registry office bribes. Laxman Utekar directs this whole middle-India hustle with the broad strokes of a television sketch show that someone accidentally stretched out to two hours and twelve minutes. Characters enter doors with loud greetings, leave them with theatrical slams, and spend the intervening runtime yelling over each other about joint family politics in a way that feels less like observed behavior and more like a writer's room trying to hit every single demographic quota for contemporary Hindi films without ever breaking a sweat. The screenplay by Maitrey Mukherjee and Ramiz Ilkhan relies entirely on the kind of mechanical misunderstandings that were already feeling a bit tired back when Govinda was doing them in the nineties, though here they’re dressed up in the modern vocabulary of housing loans, government schemes, and the desperate scramble for personal space.

Vicky Kaushal plays Kapil, a yoga instructor whose patience seems to have been manufactured in a factory designed specifically to make audiences feel slightly guilty for losing their temper during rush hour traffic, and he wears this permanently strained expression that suggests he is constantly trying to remember if he left the kitchen gas turned off. Sara Ali Khan plays his wife Somya, a school teacher who possesses an aggressive sort of ambition that mostly manifests as her stomping around their cramped shared living room and complaining about the lack of privacy during intimate moments. Their chemistry has a weirdly transactional quality to it, like two coworkers who have been paired up for a mandatory team-building exercise and decided the best way to get through it is just to shout their lines louder than necessary. When they argue, which is roughly every six minutes, they circle each other with the practiced choreography of a dance reality show rehearsal, hitting their marks with mechanical precision while their eyes occasionally dart toward the camera operator to make sure they are still in the key light. It is hard to buy into their desperate need for a one-BHK apartment when every time they fight, it looks like they are just waiting for the director to call cut so they can go check their phones in the vanity van. That said, Neeraj Sood manages to wring a few genuine beats of weary dignity out of his role as the older brother who is just trying to keep the electricity bill paid, and every time he is on screen, the movie briefly stops feeling like a marketing pitch for affordable housing and starts looking like actual human beings reacting to the grinding gears of modern urban poverty.

The cinematography by Raghav Ramadass washes everything in a sickly, over-saturated yellow that is apparently supposed to communicate the warmth of small-town Madhya Pradesh, but mostly just makes every indoor scene look like it was lit by a malfunctioning neon bulb in a butcher shop. Every single wall in the joint family house is painted in shades of mustard or turmeric, and after the first forty minutes, your eyes start aching for a single cool blue or a patch of neutral gray just to break up the visual monotony. Then there is the soundtrack, which features Sachin-Jigar recycling beats and melodies from half a dozen other romantic comedies of the past decade without adding a single fresh hook or memorable lyric. The main romantic track plays at least four separate times, twice as a montage, once as a background instrumental during a cooking scene, and once as an actual lip-synced number where the background dancers look like they were pulled off the street five minutes before rolling camera. It gets grating, especially when the editing cuts between close-ups of the leads looking wistful and wide shots of Indore traffic that have clearly been stock footage bought off the internet. The supporting cast does what they can with dialogue that belongs in a sitcom about uncles and aunts, though Meghna Agarwal occasionally pops up with a deadpan line delivery that hits harder than anything the main couple is given to work with.

There is a specific kind of middle-class anxiety that Bollywood movies love to exploit right now, turning bureaucratic nightmares and housing shortages into cute romantic obstacles for attractive people to overcome with folksy wisdom and a background score featuring acoustic guitars. It reminds me a bit of Badhaai Ho in the way it attempts to weaponize domestic embarrassment for comedic effect, but without any of that film's sharp eye for class hypocrisy or generational friction. Here, the fake divorce is treated as a fun little prank that spirals out of control rather than an act of sheer desperation born from a housing market that treats human beings like inventory. The script wants us to root for Kapil and Somya to get their own government-subsidized flat, yet it never stops to ask why two working adults in a bustling city should have to resort to legal fraud just to find a place where they can close a door without someone shouting from the other side. By turning structural failure into a sitcom premise, the film defangs its own subject matter until nothing is left except a series of loud arguments in cramped rooms and predictable emotional reconciliations that resolve nothing about the actual economic reality of the characters. Inaamulhaq shows up briefly as a cynical bureaucrat who treats human misery with absolute administrative boredom, and for about three minutes, the movie feels dangerous because he is the only person on screen acting like this situation is actually miserable instead of adorable.

You walk out of the theater wondering who this was actually made for, since the jokes feel too broad for anyone living through these housing struggles and the dramatic stakes feel too low for anyone looking for actual cinematic engagement. It is not a disaster by any stretch, just an aggressively average piece of content that takes up space on a Friday afternoon and leaves no residue behind once you hit the parking lot. The leads smile, the supporting actors sweat through their cotton kurtas, the Indore street food looks greasy and appealing in equal measure, and the plot ticks along its predetermined rails without ever once derailing or surprising you with a genuine insight into human behavior. Hindi movies have been recycling this exact formula of small-town aspirations and domestic squabbles for years now, and unless the writers start trusting audiences with characters who aren't just collections of regional quirks and financial anxieties, we are going to be stuck watching people yell in yellow rooms until the end of time. The final scene rolls around with all the inevitability of a municipal tax bill, wrapping up loose threads with a hurriedness that suggests even the editing team was getting tired of the set design, and then the credits hit, accompanied by that same acoustic guitar riff one last time just in case you missed the memo about how breezy and lighthearted the whole ordeal was supposed to be.