Dhanush says a word in Tamil right in the middle of a Hindi argument and it sounds less like a character choice and more like the actor just forgot where he was for a second. If I'm honest, that tiny slip-up tells you more about the chaotic energy of Atrangi Re than any press release ever could. Aanand L. Rai has always chased after a very specific kind of messy north-Indian romance where people throw things, scream over each other, and sweat through their clothes. Here, that aesthetic gets pushed so far past the breaking point that the film practically vibrates off the screen, humming with a sort of frantic desperation to keep your attention. It's a loud movie, and not just because of the brass instruments in the background. It rattles around your head for hours after you leave the theatre, leaving behind an odd mixture of genuine affection and mild exhaustion that takes a while to shake off.

The screenplay by Himanshu Sharma feels constructed out of three completely different drafts that refused to merge and were just stapled together instead. You get this madcap rural farce in the first half hour involving shotgun weddings, running through mustard fields, and actors playing decades younger than they actually are with the help of some deeply optimistic lighting. Then the gears grind, a sharp narrative turn hits out of nowhere, and suddenly we are knee-deep in a clinical exploration of severe psychological trauma that treats its characters with a gravity the earlier scenes never earned. Rai shoots these tonal shifts with the subtlety of a falling piano. He relies on frantic zoom-ins and whip pans that make you feel like you are watching a soap opera directed by someone who drank too much espresso. Characters burst into tears or laughter without any visible bridge between the two states, leaving the actors to bridge chasms with pure charisma.

Sara Ali Khan takes on the role of Rinku, a young woman whose life is essentially an unbroken chain of violent abandonments, and she plays her with a loud, aggressive theatricality that works when she is allowed to just be angry. She lacks the internal stillness that someone like Konkona Sen Sharma brought to erratic characters in past hindi films, substituting volume and wide-eyed stares for actual vulnerability. Yet there are moments, usually when she is sitting quietly by herself on a train or refusing to look someone in the eye, where something real breaks through the surface gloss. Dhanush is doing the heavy lifting here, playing a Tamil doctor trapped in a nightmare wedding with a grace that borders on sainthood. He brings a grounded, weary warmth to proceedings that threaten to fly completely off the handle every five minutes, reacting to the madness around him with small, pinched expressions of disbelief that land every single time.

Then there is Akshay Kumar as Sajjad, the magical realist figure who appears whenever Rinku needs him, floating in on a white horse or materializing out of thin air with a theatrical flourish that belongs in a circus. Kumar plays the part with a kind of blank, unblinking earnestness that feels completely disconnected from the rest of the movie, as if he wandered off the set of a period epic and accidentally ended up in a psychological drama. It is a strange, frictionless performance that never quite convinces you he occupies the same physical plane as the other actors, floating through scenes like a ghost at a banquet. He doesn't have much to do besides look protective and wear elaborate vintage coats, but his presence hangs over the narrative like a persistent fog that refuses to lift no matter how bright the lighting gets.

The visual language matches this disjointed approach, lurching between sun-drenched pastoral romanticism and harsh, clinical blues whenever the plot requires a reminder of mental illness. Pankaj Kumar's cinematography loves a wide-angle lens pushed right up into an actor's nose, distorting faces and creating a sense of claustrophobia that makes even open-air village squares feel like padded cells. A.R. Rahman provides a score that is leagues better than the material it supports, wrapping the erratic narrative in sweeping, melancholy-adjacent melodies that try desperately to make you care about people who are mostly just screaming at each other. Chaka Chak becomes an earworm you cannot escape, though the way it is deployed for the third time in forty minutes starts to feel like a mild form of psychological torture.

Underneath all the narrative plumbing and the tonal whiplash, the film wants to talk about how people invent entire internal worlds to survive the unbearable cruelty of their actual childhoods. It suggests that love, even when it is born out of delusion or forced circumstance, might still carry a medicinal property that psychiatry cannot fully replicate or replace. That is a fascinating idea to play with in mainstream cinema, especially within the traditionally formulaic boundaries of Bollywood movies where mental health is usually treated as a punchline or a cursed bloodline. But the film keeps undermining its own thesis by playing the most distressing episodes for broad, farcical laughs before pivoting on a dime to demand your deepest sympathy for the protagonist's ongoing suffering.

There is also a deeply annoying supporting actor in the Delhi scenes—the one who plays the cousin with the atrocious hair—whose dialogue is so obviously loop-dubbed in a small studio booth that his mouth movements rarely match the audio track for more than three syllables at a stretch. It’s a small thing, sure, but when a movie is already asking you to swallow giant leaps in logic and narrative coherence, these little technical lazinesses accumulate until they sink the whole enterprise. By the time we reach the climax in the psychiatric ward, where every loose thread is tied up with industrial-strength rope and a very heavy-handed voiceover, the emotional exhaustion is complete. Atrangi Re is too chaotic to dismiss as a misfire and too messy to celebrate as a triumph, sitting instead in that uncomfortable middle space where ambition outruns execution by a country mile.