That van looks like it died somewhere near Bangalore and refused to be towed any further. If I'm honest, the whole visual setup of Karwaan starts from a place of minor automotive irritation and just stays there, vibrating on bad shocks and dusty asphalt. It is not a sleek machine. It is a slow, beige box rattling down secondary highways with three mismatched people crammed inside who would rather be anywhere else on God’s green earth. Dulquer Salmaan plays Shaukat’s reluctant partner in this corpse-swapping comedy with a face that looks permanently frozen in mild annoyance at an excel spreadsheet. He is playing a corporate drone who hates his job with a quiet, burning intensity that feels entirely recognizable to anyone who has ever stared at a glowing monitor at eleven at night wondering how their life narrowed down to such a specific point of nowhere. Beside him sits Irrfan Khan as Shaukat, delivering dialogue like he is chewing on dry biscuits and enjoying every difficult crumb. Shaukat is the kind of man who has an opinion on everything from road safety to moral hygiene, and he deploys these opinions with total disregard for whether anyone is listening. It is a performance that operates entirely on timing and side-eyes, a masterclass in making a loudmouth deeply endearing without ever softening his sharper, more annoying edges. Mithila Palkar rounds out the trio as Tanya, a teenager dealing with sudden grief by adopting a shell of aggressive self-reliance that occasionally cracks to reveal genuine panic. They are forced together because of a logistical mix-up at a cargo terminal involving two dead bodies in identical coffins, which is the sort of premise that belongs in a lesser Hindi movie that would have treated the whole setup with frantic, door-slapping farce.

Akarsh Khurana directs this mess with a loose hand that lets scenes breathe long past the point where a tighter studio picture would have trimmed the fat and moved the plot along to the next beat. Sometimes this works wonders because the silence between these characters tells you more about their unspoken baggage than any tearful monologue ever could. Other times it just leaves you watching Dulquer Salmaan stare out a window for four seconds too long, waiting for a cue that feels like it got lost somewhere in the editing suite. The screenplay, co-written by Bejoy Nambiar and Hussain Dalal, hits a few too many familiar notes when it tries to dig into the emotional wounds of its characters, relying on standard-issue paternal estrangement tropes that feel borrowed straight from Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara without carrying that film's buoyant, postcard-ready energy. Yet the dialogue saves it. The lines have a lived-in texture, peppered with regional slang and casual cruelty that friends actually hurl at each other when they are stuck in traffic for six hours. Shaukat’s conservative moralizing is constantly undercut by his own hypocrisy, and Khan plays those hypocrisies with a straight face that is worth the price of admission alone. The camera work by Avinash Arun captures the transition from the sterile, fluorescent-lit cubicles of Bangalore to the damp, green sprawl of Kochi with a gritty realism that refuses to romanticize the journey too much. It is dusty. The sweat looks real on their necks. When they stop at roadside dhabas, you can almost smell the frying oil and stale diesel fumes drifting off the highway.

Hindi films have a long, tiring history of turning road trips into spiritual awakenings where everyone learns to forgive their fathers and dance in the rain by the time the third act rolls around. Karwaan flirts with this trap constantly, walking right up to the edge of emotional cliché before pulling back just enough to keep things interesting. Shaukat’s religious conservatism is played for laughs, sure, but it also grounds him in a specific cultural reality that doesn't feel like it was invented by a screenwriter sitting in a Mumbai coffee shop. When he judges Tanya’s clothes or berates a waiter, he sounds like an actual uncle you might actively try to avoid at a family wedding. Salmaan anchors the chaos with a performance of heavy, brooding stillness that makes his eventual emotional release feel earned rather than forced upon him by the script. He doesn't do much with his hands; he mostly just sits behind the steering wheel gripping it like he wants to choke the rubber right off the core. Palkar holds her own against two heavyweights by refusing to play the cute, wise-cracking kid, giving Tanya an abrasive defensive armor that takes a long time to chip away. The soundtrack weaves in and out of the narrative without demanding too much attention, though one particular acoustic track plays during a transition shot of the highway so many times you start praying for silence by the third hour.

There is a recurring audio issue with some of the secondary dubbing in the crowd scenes that sounds like it was recorded in a tiled bathroom with a cheap microphone, a small production blemish that pulls you right out of the illusion for a few seconds. It is a minor gripe, obviously, but when a film relies so heavily on naturalistic atmosphere, those little technical cracks stand out like grease on a white shirt. Bollywood movies often struggle with tone when mixing broad comedy with genuine bereavement, usually tipping too far into weeping violins or slapstick pratfalls at the absolute worst possible moments. Khurana mostly avoids this whiplash by keeping the stakes small and personal, refusing to turn the dead bodies into grand metaphors for existential dread. They are just logistical inconveniences that force three broken people to talk to each other when they would rather crawl into a hole and die of embarrassment. The locations do a lot of the heavy lifting. The coastal humidity practically drips off the screen during the final stretch in Kerala, changing the visual temperature of the movie from the dusty beige of the central plateau to a deep, bruised green that feels alive and heavy with moisture. It is a slow burn that requires some patience from the audience, especially during the middle forty minutes where the van breaks down for the second time and nobody says anything particularly profound for what feels like an eternity.

By the time they reach the coast, the film has settled into a comfortable, lopsided rhythm that doesn't feel the need to tie up every single loose emotional thread with a neat little bow. Shaukat gets his moments of redemption, but they are small, messy ones that involve grudging apologies and cheap tea rather than grand declarations of love under a sunset. Dulquer’s character figures out what to do with his father’s ashes, but the act itself is surprisingly unceremonious, lacking the heavy brass-band sentimentality you might expect from a mainstream drama of this scale. It just happens. People argue, a van gets returned, and life goes back to whatever boring shape it took before the detour scrambled everything up. That refusal to overstate its own wisdom is perhaps the best thing going for it. It isn't trying to change how you look at the world or fix your relationship with your own parents. It just wants to sit in a broken-down vehicle for two hours with three interesting people who talk too much and listen too little, watching the scenery blur past until the engine finally gives out for good.