Pavail Gulati spends the first twenty minutes of I Love You doing something genuinely irritating with his lower jaw, jutting it forward every time he tries to sound sincere, which is almost constantly because the man is playing a corporate stalker who thinks he is the romantic lead in a Dharma production. If I'm honest, it took me completely out of the movie for a good stretch, making me wonder if the casting director just grabbed the first guy who looked good in a well-tailored navy blazer and didn't bother asking about vocal cadence or physical presence.

Director Nikhil Mahajan tries to squeeze an entire Hitchcockian apartment-bound thriller out of a premise that barely justifies a twenty-minute short, stretching the architectural geography of a single luxury penthouse until the floor-to-ceiling glass windows start feeling less like expensive set design and more like a cardboard box with a scenic desktop wallpaper taped to the sides. The screenplay keeps shifting gears from a forced anniversary dinner that goes sour to a heavy-handed debate on consent, digital footprint anxiety, and the terrifying ubiquity of smart home gadgets, rattling through these shifts without ever finding a steady baseline tone that doesn't feel like a rejected script for a web series.

Rakul Preet Singh is stuck carrying the physical weight of this claustrophobic nonsense, mostly by running barefoot across marble flooring while clutching a bleeding foot and hyperventilating in ways that suggest nobody on set gave her a clear map of emotional beats to hit from scene to scene. She spends a lot of time trapped in bathrooms and behind kitchen islands, weaponizing wine glasses and rolling pins, giving it an honest effort even when the dialogue sounds like it was translated from an instructional manual for home security systems by someone who had never actually spoken English to another human being. When she finally gets to turn the tables on her tormentor, the movie wants you to cheer for her empowerment, but the setup is so clumsy and cartoonish that it feels less like a feminist triumph and more like a looney tunes sketch played out with grim seriousness under moody blue lighting.

Akshay Oberoi shows up later in a supporting capacity and is clearly dubbed by someone who recorded their lines in a tiled bathroom using a cheap podcast mic, a technical distraction that kept jarring me right out of the supposed suspense every time he opened his mouth. It's a small thing, but it bugged me, rattling around in my head while the score pumped out these thumping bass-heavy electronic cues that felt imported directly from a mid-tier Telugu actioner rather than a psychological cat-and-mouse game set in a high-rise.

The cinematography by Anuj Rakesh Dhawan relies way too heavily on spinning drone shots of Delhi traffic and harsh neon blues bleeding through glass, creating a glossy veneer that looks like every other straight-to-streaming thriller cluttering up the algorithmic feeds of modern platforms. Hindi movies have had this weird obsession with desaturated color grading for years now, pretending that turning down the saturation dial somehow equals grit and realism, when really it just makes every actor look like they need a vitamin B shot and a nap.

There is an ambition here to talk about the modern urban paranoia plaguing young professionals who live alone in glass cages, trusting their door locks to Wi-Fi routers and their romantic lives to dating apps, but the film treats its themes like blunt instruments rather than ideas to be explored with any actual curiosity. It wants to be a sharp critique of male entitlement, yet it keeps lingering on shots of Singh in various states of distress that feel less about character vulnerability and more about pandering to a specific kind of voyeuristic gaze that contradicts everything the narrative claims to stand for. Think of how tightly executed something like Sriram Raghavan's Badlapur felt when dealing with obsession and revenge, keeping the dirt under its fingernails while maintaining a grip on narrative momentum, and then look at the squeaky-clean, plastic-wrapped surfaces of this project, where even the blood looks like high-fructose corn syrup mixed with red food coloring.

Pavail Gulati tries to play menacing by whispering his lines and smiling with just the right side of his mouth, but he lacks the genuine, unsettling unpredictability that made someone like Shah Rukh Khan in Darr so memorable before the romance took over the narrative logic. He just seems like a guy who read a couple of Reddit threads about toxic masculinity and decided to build his entire personality out of buzzwords, stalking his victim while spouting philosophical nonsense about destiny and soulmates that belongs in a bad Instagram caption rather than a dramatic confrontation.

The supporting characters exist solely to move the plot from point A to point B via awkward phone calls and video chats where the buffering circle spins just long enough to create fake tension before someone delivers a piece of exposition that clears up a mystery nobody was actually invested in solving. You can see every twist coming down the pipe thirty minutes before it lands, signaled by a sudden change in the lighting or a lingering close-up on a household appliance that will inevitably become a weapon during the third-act showdown.

Hindi films have struggled lately to find middle-ground narratives that aren't bloated three-hour epics or hyper-compressed streaming experiments designed for people who are scrolling on their phones while the dialogue plays in the background, and this project sits squarely in that awkward gap. It refuses to commit fully to the trashy, pulpy fun of old-school B-movies, yet it's far too shallow and mechanical to work as a serious psychological study of trauma and survival.

Rakul Preet Singh deserves better material than this half-baked digital age morality play, especially since she has shown genuine comedic and dramatic chops elsewhere when given directors who know how to pace a scene without relying on endless reaction shots and thunderous audio stings. Every time she tries to ground her character with a quiet moment of exhaustion, the editing cuts away to another drone shot of the city skyline as if terrified that the audience might get bored if left alone with a performance for more than ten consecutive seconds.

When the credits finally roll, you are left with the distinct impression of having spent ninety minutes inside a very expensive hotel room with two people you wouldn't want to make small talk with at a party, wondering why anyone thought this particular home invasion scenario needed to be committed to digital sensor. It is neither offensive enough to hate nor clever enough to recommend, occupying that vast, gray middle tier of content production where ideas go to get flattened out into harmless, forgettable mush.