There is a specific kind of digital panic that arrives the moment a parent learns how to use Facebook Messenger, and Rajma Chawal begins right in that suffocating space. Rishi Kapoor plays a grieving, wildly out-of-touch father who decides that stalking his estranged son through a fake profile is the best way to bridge a continent-wide chasm, and if I am honest, that premise sounds like the kind of high-concept disaster that usually gets buried on a streaming platform on a quiet Friday. Chandni Chowk has never looked quite this much like an Instagram filter, bathed in saturated oranges and blues that try desperately to mask the digital grain of a hurried shoot. Director Leena Yadav, working with a screenplay that feels like it was punched out on a phone during a bumpy cab ride, attempts to wrangle the generational friction of modern Delhi into something resembling a comedy. She does not always succeed, but the sheer velocity of the miscalculations keeps the engine sputtering forward even when the suspension is entirely shot. It is a messy affair, trading in broad caricatures of teenage rebellion while simultaneously trying to construct a tender monument to paternal loneliness.

Rishi Kapoor grunts, huffs, and hurls himself into the role of Raj Mathur with a ferocious, slightly exhausting energy that recalls his sharper work in Kapoor and Sons, though here the material rarely meets him halfway. He plays a man who refuses to understand that the internet is not just an angry letter you send through a wire. When he attempts to flirt with his own son online under the guise of a millennial woman named Tara, the movie flirts dangerously with cringe territory before pulling back into safer, sweeter waters. He navigates the physical space of his chaotic old-Delhi home with the weariness of a guy who has spent forty years eating the same dal and yelling at the same electricity board, grounding the high-concept digital nonsense in the heavy, sweat-stained reality of the walled city. Across from him, Anirudh Tanwar plays the son, Kabir, with a frustratingly muted flatness that makes you wonder if he left his character definition in the dressing room. He mopes around Berlin rooftops and dingy cafes with the exact same expression of mild annoyance, whether he is dodging his dad's fraudulent friend requests or trying to find his footing as an artist. There is a supporting turn from Aparshakti Khurana that mostly consists of delivering sarcastic one-liners while leaning against motorbikes, and while it adds some necessary snap to the proceedings, it is a small thing but it bugged me that his wig looks like it was borrowed from a high school production of Grease.

Amyra Dastur enters the frame as Seher, the real-world cipher who embodies the hyper-connected, effortlessly cool youth that Kabir supposedly belongs to, yet her character is written with all the depth of a Pinterest board. She has to spout dialogue about finding oneself through photography and street food while wearing an assortment of thrift-store jackets that cost more than a month of rent in the neighborhood they are shooting in, and she manages to make the lines sound almost human through sheer force of charisma. The cinematography by Himman Dhamija embraces the sensory overload of Old Delhi, tracking through tangled overhead wires and narrow alleys crowded with scooters and stray dogs, but the color grading shifts so drastically between interior and exterior shots that you can practically see the editing suite wrestling with the footage. Halfway through, a recurring acoustic indie-pop track kicks in during every single moment of romantic introspection, and after the fourth time it loops over a montage of people staring at glowing rectangular screens, you begin to pray for absolute silence. Hindi movies have long struggled with how to depict the internet without looking like a middle-aged executive trying to explain a meme, and this film falls squarely into that same embarrassing trap, confusing Wi-Fi router lights with emotional illumination.

Yet the film stumbles into moments of genuine grace whenever it abandons the plot mechanics of the catfish scam and simply watches these people yell at each other across dinner tables. The food looks incredible, greasy and steaming in brass bowls that have seen generations of family squabbles, anchoring the digital anxiety in a very tangible, corporeal mess. Bollywood movies often treat tradition and modernity as a perpetual boxing match where one side has to get knocked out, but here the edges blur in messy ways. Fathers don't suddenly become woke tech-literate liberals, and sons don't magically forgive decades of emotional neglect just because a Facebook message gets a laughing emoji. The narrative wanders into cul-de-sacs about grief, patriarchy, and the claustrophobia of familial expectations without ever pausing to deliver a neat sermon. There are scenes where Kapoor's face hardens into a mask of pure, unadulterated sorrow that remind you why he remained a vital screen presence long after his romantic-lead days had expired. He does not play Raj as a lovable curmudgeon; he plays him as a desperate, lonely man who is genuinely dangerous to his own child's happiness, and that lack of sentimentality saves the character from sinking into pure caricature.

The pacing collapses in the final third as the digital deception inevitably unravels, forcing characters to sprint through alleyways and deliver expositional confessions that sound like they were translated from a different language entirely. It is loud, it is occasionally incoherent, and it refuses to offer the comforting closure that usually cushions these culture-clash stories. The sound design drops out completely during a confrontation on a crowded railway overpass, leaving only the sound of heavy breathing and distant traffic, and for about thirty seconds, the movie feels like something entirely different—something urgent and bruising and true. Then a scooter honks, the indie guitar plucks start up again, and the illusion shatters against the reality of a script that just wants to get everyone home in time for dinner. It is not a complete disaster, but it leaves you wishing the filmmakers had trusted their actors half as much as they trusted their screenwriters to invent new ways for families to misunderstand one another.