The dubbing on Dharmendra in the first twenty minutes sounds like it was recorded in a tiled hallway using a hand-held microphone from 2004, which is a small thing to fixate on perhaps, but it takes you right out of the establishing domestic chaos.

Amit Joshi and Aradhana Sah direct with the sort of nervous energy that usually gets mistaken for pace, rushing us past the premise that a robotics engineer might fall in love with his aunt's domestic android because the script knows if you stop to think about the logistics for even four consecutive seconds the whole contraption falls apart like cheap flat-pack furniture.

Shahid Kapoor plays Aryan with a sweaty, frantic desperation that feels less like romantic obsession and more like a man having a very public panic attack inside a wedding tent, throwing his limbs around the frame with an intensity that completely dwarfs the material and makes you wonder how different this would have looked if he had just dialed it down to a normal human temperature.

Kriti Sanon has the harder job because she has to play SIFRA with rigid neck movements and deadpan vocal inflections that somehow still need to convey a slow-burning emotional awakening, and if I'm honest she manages it better than the dialogue deserves, walking that razor-thin line between uncanny valley and genuine charm without ever leaning too hard on the Terminator bits.

Hindi cinema has always had a strange relationship with technology, usually treating computers like glowing boxes of magic or moral hazard, so watching a mainstream production stumble through the basics of artificial intelligence with the wide-eyed innocence of someone who just discovered ChatGPT is both endearing and slightly exhausting.

The cinematography relies heavily on that glossy, over-lit digital sheen that makes every indoor location look like a high-end furniture showroom in Noida, washing out any texture the frame might have had and leaving us with actors who look like they've been dipped in clear lacquer before every take.

Then the soundtrack kicks in with yet another remix of a nineties track that nobody asked for, blasting through the speakers with a compressed loudness that rattles your fillings every time the narrative needs to manufacture some fake momentum because the scene between Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia is simply treading water.

Kapodaia herself looks like she wandered onto the set from an entirely different movie, bringing a grounded, weary authority to scenes where she has to yell at her grandson about marriage quotas, treating the nonsense with a straight face that gives the picture its only real anchor when things threaten to drift completely into cartoons.

Arjun Panchal pops up in the background as the requisite tech-support buddy, delivering exposition with a forced casualness that suggests he was cast about ten minutes before they started rolling cameras on that particular Delhi schedule, smiling through lines about algorithms like he is reading a grocery list at gunpoint.

We are supposed to buy into this weird cyborg romance because the central pairing has a bouncy, fizzy chemistry that works well enough during the dance numbers, though the script forgets to establish why a man who builds advanced neural networks would be so utterly flabbergasted by a machine that can make tea and do basic banter.

Bollywood movies have spent decades trying to update the traditional boy-meets-girl formula for the smartphone era, resulting in bizarre hybrids where arranged marriage pressure collides with sci-fi nonsense, and this one leans into that tonal chaos with a cheerful disregard for coherence that almost wins you over by the halfway mark.

There is a specific kind of middle-class Delhi living room that Hindi films love to use as a staging ground for family comedy, packed with ugly patterned cushions and too many cousins shouting over each other, and the production design captures that claustrophobic warmth even if the camera never quite figures out where to put people so the room doesn't look cramped.

Shahid Kapoor has spent a good portion of his career playing intense, brooding wrecks who smoke too much and yell at women, so watching him lean into physical comedy and high-pitched whining is a welcome gear shift, even if he occasionally pushes the performance so hard his face turns the color of a ripe plum.

Kriti Sanon holds her own against that manic energy by simply refusing to blink during crucial close-ups, maintaining a terrifyingly steady gaze that sells the android aspect far better than any digital effects or sound design choices ever could.

The screenplay keeps introducing weird rules about SIFRA's programming and then forgetting them five minutes later whenever a comic set-piece demands a quick escape or a misunderstanding in a hotel lobby, treating continuity as a loose suggestion rather than a requirement.

Watching this thing stretch past the two-hour mark feels like sitting through a very long flight where the movie playing on the small screen in front of you is neither good enough to hold your full attention nor bad enough to turn off, leaving you in that hazy middle zone where you start noticing the weird texture of the hotel curtains in the background.

That background noise, that constant hum of mediocre execution and desperate high-concept plotting, is what lingers long after the credits fade on a dance routine that recycles half the choreography from earlier in the runtime, leaving us right back where we started without ever really figuring out what it wanted to say about love, metal, or the modern family.