There is a strange, whistling sound on the soundtrack during the second reel of I Love New Year that I still can't quite trace, some persistent audio artifact that sounds like a tea kettle left on a low burner just out of frame. It stays for maybe four minutes, entirely ignored by the mix, hovering right behind Kangna Ranaut as she delivers lines about corporate banking with the kind of glazed, professional detachment that usually suggests the actor's mind is actively drafting a grocery list.

Radhika Rao and Vinay Sapru direct with the frantic energy of people who have only ever seen New York City through the glossy pages of an outdated travel brochure bought at a rest stop in New Jersey. They frame skyscrapers like postcards that have been laminated and dropped in puddles, all neon smears and soft-focus bokeh that tries desperately to convince you that mid-winter Manhattan smells like roasted peanuts and expensive perfume instead of wet cardboard and municipal heating exhaust. The screenplay, if we are going to be charitable and call it that, feels like it was written on a napkin during a layover at Heathrow and then expanded through sheer stubbornness over several years of post-production hell that left the film sitting on a shelf gathering metaphorical dust until someone apparently lost a bet and decided to release it.

Sunny Deol plays Randhir, a corporate wallah with all the natural romantic charm of a filing cabinet being dragged across a hardwood floor, wearing sweaters that look heavy enough to cause minor posture issues. He is forty-something, intensely domestic, and perpetually bewildered by the concept of casual social interaction, which makes his casting as a suave Manhattan banker one of those wonderful casting choices that only really makes sense in the parallel dimension where modern bollywood movies are manufactured in bulk. When he tries to look smitten, his facial expression doesn't shift so much as it settles into a deeper groove of mild constipation, staring at Ranaut with eyes that seem to be trying to remember if he left the gas stove on back in Queens.

Ranaut, playing a musician named Tikku who possesses the apartment of a hedge fund manager and the wardrobe of someone who raided a thrift store after midnight, operates on an entirely different frequency of performance that occasionally threatens to tear the frame apart from the inside. She spits her dialogue out like she is annoyed at the punctuation, rushing past commas as if she has somewhere much better to be, which, to be fair, she almost certainly did. There is a scene where she attempts to explain her philosophy on life while making instant coffee, and she stirs the mug with such aggressive, cyclical precision that you stop listening to the conversation entirely and just wonder if she is going to crack the ceramic.

The cinematography relies heavily on a digital sheen that flattens every single shadow out of existence, making the interiors of these New York apartments look less like lived-in spaces and more like high-end furniture showrooms where the cleaning crew has just finished mopping with industrial disinfectant. Pritam's music doesn't help matters, looping the same three-note piano motif every time the characters look pensively out of a frosted window at cabs driving past. It reminds me a bit of how Salman Khan used to wander through similarly sterile foreign locations in older hindi films, though without that specific brand of manic star wattage that could sometimes fool you into thinking something interesting was happening on screen.

The central conceit of the narrative revolves around mistaken identity and crossed time zones, a plot engine that requires both leads to be profoundly unobservant about their immediate surroundings for roughly two hours. They swap apartments through a convoluted series of logistical coincidences that defy both urban real estate markets and basic human curiosity, wandering around each other's living quarters as though nobody else has ever touched the furniture. Prem Chopra shows up as a genial landlord with the weary grin of a man who cashed his check on day one and has spent the rest of the shoot trying to find the craft services table.

There is an awkwardness to the pacing that feels less like deliberate stylistic minimalism and more like the editing bay simply ran out of coverage and had to stitch together whatever reaction shots were still salvageable from the hard drives. Tannishtha Chatterjee is wasted in a supporting role that consists largely of standing slightly behind Ranaut and nodding at appropriate intervals while wearing scarves that look remarkably heavy for indoor wear. You can practically see the seams where various scenes were chopped down to fit a standard running time, leaving narrative gaps large enough to drive a yellow cab through without grazing the bumpers.

Hindi cinema has a long and storied tradition of romantic comedies where the obstacles are entirely manufactured by stubbornness and poor cell reception, but here the contrivances feel peculiarly heavy-handed, lacking the buoyant absurdity that usually makes these scripts go down smooth. Virag Mishra's dialogue has this odd habit of ending sentences on prepositions, giving every major exchange a weirdly tentative rhythm that leaves the actors dangling for a beat before the next cue.

It is not a disaster on the scale of true camp, nor is it offensive enough to demand genuine critical outrage, sitting instead in that vast gray middle where most forgettable studio product goes to die quietly on streaming carousels. When Deol finally breaks into his trademark brooding stare during the climax, you half-expect him to rip a door off its hinges just to give the crew something to do, but the script denies him even that basic mechanical pleasure.

The supporting players mostly mill about in the background like extras who wandered onto the wrong set and decided to just stay put until someone told them to leave, providing a steady stream of non-committal glances at the main action. The sound design drops dialogue completely out of nowhere during scenes shot on location in Central Park, replacing natural ambient murmur with a tinny studio loop of birds chirping that sounds like it was ripped from a free CD-ROM in 1998.

Near the end, during a rooftop party that is supposed to look like New Year's Eve but clearly was shot at three in the afternoon under an overcast sky with twenty people holding plastic champagne flutes, the camera pans slowly across the horizon and lingers on a crane that has nothing to do with the narrative. It stays there for six seconds. I timed it.