There is a specific kind of shoulder twitch Avinash Tiwary does about twenty minutes into Imtiaz Ali’s script for Laila Majnu that I kept thinking about days after leaving the theater, long after the plot had finished twisting itself into knots. He plays Qais, a man who slides from spoiled corporate heir into something closer to a forest-dwelling ghost, and he does this thing where he hitches his right shoulder up toward his ear before delivering a line, like he’s trying to shake off a heavy jacket that isn't actually there. It's a small thing, but it bugged me initially because it felt too studied, too much like acting school homework, until the narrative catches up to his frantic internal state and suddenly that twitch makes absolute, devastating sense. Most contemporary hindi films are so terrified of their actors looking awkward that every gesture gets sanded down to a smooth, marketable veneer, so seeing a lead performance that risks looking ridiculous feels like finding actual water in a desert.

Sajid Ali sits in the director's chair, but the heavy, sweaty thumbprint of his brother Imtiaz is smeared all over every frame, for better and occasionally for a lot worse. Imtiaz wrote the thing, and you can spot his fixations from miles away: the restless young men who don't know what to do with their hands, the idealized women who seem to exist purely to catalyze male emotional breakdowns, the sweeping Kashmir locations that look less like a real place and more like an advertisement for state tourism boards shot through a blue-tinted filter. But where Rockstar often suffocated under the weight of its own artistic importance, this 2018 release keeps slipping sideways into a weird, greasy realism that keeps you off balance. The supporting cast sometimes feels like they wandered in from a completely different project, especially the actors playing the local rival families whose blood feuds are meant to drive the plot forward with Shakespearean urgency, but instead come across like background players from a mid-tier television serial who were told to look menacing while holding Kalashnikovs.

Then Tripti Dimri walks on screen and anchors the entire enterprise simply by refusing to overact, which is harder than it sounds when your co-star is chewing the scenery into fine sawdust. She plays Laila as someone who is half-bored by her own myth, a woman trapped inside the narrow, suffocating corridors of a conservative society who treats her own rebellion as a mild afternoon pastime until the trap actually snaps shut. Watch her face during the scene where Qais makes an absolute public fool of himself outside her college gates; she isn't glowing with romantic validation or weeping with cinematic terror, she just looks deeply, profoundly embarrassed for him, the way you feel when a friend drinks too much at a wedding and starts reciting slam poetry to strangers. That resistance to standard genre tropes is what makes the first half hour hum with genuine life, even when the dialogue dips into that overly lyrical Bollywood cadence that sounds like nobody who has ever lived or breathed.

The music, composed chiefly by Niladri Kumar and Joi Barua, does something sneaky to the pacing by constantly pushing emotional buttons before the audience has actually earned them. I could have done without the third or fourth instrumental reprisal of "Hafiz Hafiz" playing over yet another slow-motion montage of Qais staring moodily out of a window while snow falls in artful clumps, because editors in hindi movies really need to learn that a good sequence doesn't always require a soaring string section to tell us we are supposed to feel sad now. Still, the sound design deserves credit for how it handles the transition from the bustling, horn-honking chaos of urban Srinagar to the terrifying, dead silence of the mountains where Qais spends years waiting for a ghost. You hear the wind scraping against rock faces, the crunch of frozen gravel under bare feet, the ragged wheeze of a lung that has forgotten how to take in warm air.

The second half takes a massive narrative gamble by shifting tone entirely, abandoning the breezy, almost satirical romance of the opening act and plunging straight into a grimy psychological descent that owes more to classical tragedy than modern commercial cinema. Qais returns from London looking like a street prophet who lost his razor and his mind, living in a cave while local children throw stones at him and tourists take blurry photographs with their phones like he's some kind of tourist attraction. Tiwary throws his body into the physical decay with a total lack of vanity, letting his hair mat into greasy dreadlocks and his ribs press against his skin until he looks less like a romantic hero and more like a starving stray dog that refuses to die. It is an exhausting transformation to watch unfold on a large screen, partly because the script keeps dragging out his suffering for an extra twenty minutes past the point where the emotional point has already been made.

Sumit Kaul plays the villainous husband with a slimy, understated menace that avoids the mustache-twirling traps of older genre cinema, though the film doesn't quite know what to do with his character once the central tragedy becomes solely about Qais's internal collapse. There are long stretches where the narrative simply stalls out, trading forward momentum for another poetic close-up of falling leaves or another lingering shot of a grave marker being covered in dust, testing the patience of anyone who prefers their storytelling with a bit more structural snap. Yet every time the energy flags completely, Dimri or Tiwary injects a jolt of raw, bruised vulnerability that makes you forgive the structural messiness of the enterprise. It is a messy, uneven piece of work that gets lost in its own romantic geography half the time, refusing to settle into a comfortable middle ground between gritty art-house drama and populist entertainment. You leave the theater thinking about that ridiculous shoulder twitch and the way the snow looked on the trees, which is usually a sign that something worked even if you can't quite trace the exact mechanics of how it got under your skin.