There is a specific kind of bad sound mixing in modern Hindi films that drives me completely up the wall, where a distant motorcycle sounds like it's roaring directly inside your left ear canal while two actors whisper across a kitchen table like they're underwater, and Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Shikara kicks off with this exact auditory confusion. I sat there in the dark adjusting my jacket, wondering if the projectionist had botched the levels, only to realize the film just doesn't care much for acoustic continuity when it's trying to rush you into the past. We are shoved into Kashmir in 1989 without a breath of preparation, dropped straight into a sprawling courtyard where people are shouting poetry and eating walnuts, and if I'm honest, the whole thing felt a bit rushed right out of the gate. Chopra has spent decades making glossy entertainments for the broader Bollywood machinery, but here he wants to treat a massive historical displacement like a fragile, domestic memory book, which makes for a strange tonal wobble that never quite straightens out.

The screenplay feels constructed by committee, hammering together romance clichés that wouldn't look out of place in standard romantic hindi movies from the nineties alongside documentary-style brutality that tries to punch you in the gut. Shanti and Shiv's courtship unfolds through dialogue that sounds like it was translated from bad Urdu poetry into worse English and then back again, losing all its grit in the shuffle. They argue about Shakespeare and politics while sitting by the Dal Lake, and the camera lingers on their faces just a beat too long, forcing you to watch them try and sell lines that have no natural rhythm to them. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how every time they walk through the snow, their shoes make that stock foley crunch that sounds like someone walking on cornflakes. Chopra shoots the first half like a commercial for walnut export boards, drenched in golden hour light that makes the impending tragedy feel miles away, until suddenly it isn't, and the narrative whiplash nearly throws you out of your seat.

As Shiv, Zamir Ashai has this perpetually startled expression, like a man who left his stove on back home and can't quite remember if the apartment burned down. He doesn't give you much to hold onto internally, relying instead on a soft-spoken earnestness that wears thin after the third or fourth scene where he recites verse while looking longingly out a window. Opposite him, Payal Arora as Shanti fares a bit better simply because she has sharper edges, biting into her dialogue with an impatience that suggests she'd rather be anywhere else than reciting romantic platitudes in a meadow. Their chemistry lacks the lived-in friction you saw between Rahul Bose and Nandita Das in Earth, operating instead on the level of glossy poster-art romance where nobody ever sweats or looks genuinely untidy even when fleeing their homes in the middle of the night. Hafsa Ashraf pops up in the periphery as a sharp-tongued neighbor, and for about ten minutes, she steals every single frame she's in before the script sidelines her for more sweeping helicopter shots of the valley.

Cinematographically, the film relies heavily on drone footage that swoops over pine forests and snow-capped peaks until the landscape starts to look like a screensaver you bought at a cash-and-carry. The lighting shifts from hyper-real sunshine to a sickly, digital blue whenever the plot demands we take things seriously, and the color grading feels less like a creative choice and more like a safety blanket thrown over uneven production design. There is a recurring musical motif involving a santoor that hits your ears every single time an emotional beat approaches, signaling what you are supposed to feel with the subtlety of a brass band marching through a library. Bollywood movies have leaned on this kind of emotional hand-holding for decades, but when applied to an actual historical trauma, it feels reductive, turning real human agony into a greeting card with a string section attached.

The political backdrop is treated with a strange sort of timidity, hovering around the edges of the Kashmiri Pandit exodus like a ghost nobody wants to invite into the parlor. We see the posters on the walls, we hear the distant slogans echoing through the alleyways at night, but the film keeps shrinking the frame back down to this one apartment, this one kitchen, this one domestic bubble as if expanding the lens might require taking a harder stance on who did what to whom. It wants to be a universal story about refugees and lost homes, yet it strips away the specific political machinery that drove people out, opting instead for a generalized sorrow that floats above the geography. You get the sense that Chopra was terrified of offending anyone in the audience, which naturally ends up offending everyone by turning a complex, bloody historical fracture into a soft-focus fairy tale about enduring love amid ruins.

In the refugee camps, where the second half settles into a gray, damp misery, the movie finally finds some visual grit that was missing from the idyllic opening reels. The tents are crowded, the mud is thick, and the actors look genuinely exhausted, shedding the gloss of the first hour for something much closer to skin and bone. Ashai’s performance improves here because he doesn't have to recite poetry anymore; he just has to stand in a long line for kerosene with hollow eyes, which suits his limited range much better. Yet the script keeps dragging them back to their poetry and their memories of the old house, refusing to let them live in the miserable present they've been handed, as if acknowledging the permanence of their displacement would break the romance entirely. It's an odd kind of denial built right into the structure of the storytelling, preferring the cozy ache of nostalgia over the harsh glare of an unresolved exile.

By the time the old couple visits their abandoned house years later in a sequence that feels engineered solely to drain tear ducts, the emotional machinery is grinding so loudly you can practically hear the gears turning behind the screen. The neighbor who stayed behind greets them with a smile that feels entirely unearned given the decades of silence between them, wrapping up a messy, violent history in a neat little bow of forgiveness that belongs in a totally different movie. I left the theater thinking about how hard it is to make a drama out of massive historical displacement without turning it into a melodrama, and Shikara proves that Chopra hasn't quite figured out the trick, leaning too hard on old habits and pretty pictures when the subject demanded something much sharper, colder, and far less forgiving.