There is a specific kind of loud chewing noise during the opening twenty minutes of Vikas Bahl’s Goodbye that nearly made me walk out, and if I am honest, that small auditory annoyance stayed with me longer than most of the plot mechanics. Amitabh Bachchan is eating a very crisp paratha while berating his adult children over speakerphone, and the sound design leans in so aggressively close you can hear the enamel grinding against ghee-soaked wheat. It is meant to establish his domestic tyranny and old-school obstinacy right away, but it mostly just makes you want to reach into the screen and hand him a glass of water to stop the crunching. That kitchen scene sets a tone of unfiltered domestic chaos that the movie clings to, sometimes with admirable grit and sometimes with the subtlety of a falling brick, refusing to let any conversation happen below shouting volume.

Vikas Bahl directs with a heavy hand that relies on rapid-fire cross-cutting during the first act, jumping from London office cubicles to Mumbai airport arrival gates without much regard for spatial geography. The screenplay wants to be a modern-day Baghban crossed with a quirky family reunion dramedy, but it keeps tripping over its own tonal shifts. One minute you are watching a genuinely harrowing depiction of sudden bereavement when Gayatri, played with a quiet, devastating stillness by Neena Gupta, passes away unexpectedly from a cardiac arrest. The very next minute, Sunil Grover shows up in a loud floral shirt as a spiritual guru who leads the mourning family in chanting mantras while doing pelvic stretches. It is jarring, and not always in an interesting way. The dialogue tries desperately to sound like how upper-middle-class urban families actually speak, littered with WhatsApp abbreviations and casual generational snark, but it often lands flat because the actors are wrestling with sentences that are three clauses too long for natural human breath.

Amitabh Bachchan plays Harish Bhalla, the patriarch whose grief manifests as hyper-rationalized bureaucratic rage over death certificates and cremation slots. He has played this exact shade of righteous, emotionally constipated father figure in half a dozen hindi films over the past decade, yet he still finds tiny creases of vulnerability in the armor, like the way his thumb nervously rubs the brass buckle of his belt whenever someone mentions his deceased wife's medical bills. It is a familiar bag of tricks, reminding you of his performance in Piku minus the constipation-induced philosophy, but the man commands the frame through sheer physical endurance alone. He is on screen for nearly every second of the runtime, shouting, weeping, arguing with priests, and stomping around in a crumpled kurta that smells of stale sweat and camphor.

Opposite him, Rashmika Mandanna plays Tara, the cynical, corporate-climbing daughter who lives in London and resents every single tradition her father holds dear. Mandanna has a difficult job here because Tara is written as a walking collection of millennial clichés who rolls her eyes at pujas while clutching a Starbucks cup, yet she manages to carve out moments of genuine, messy anguish. Her breakdown in a sterile London bathroom after hearing the news is acted with dry heaves and hyperventilation that feels uncomfortably real, completely devoid of the glossy, tear-streaked glamour normally associated with weeping in Bollywood movies. When she finally returns home to Chandigarh for the last rites, her physical distance from her brothers and her father creates a believable friction that grounds the family squabbles in something tangible.

The supporting cast does heavy lifting around the edges, particularly Sunil Grover, who brings a strange, deadpan comic timing to a role that could have easily been an insufferable caricature. He doesn't play the holy man as a fraud or as a saint, just as an eccentric pest who happens to understand how people behave when they are too tired to keep up their social masks. The cinematography by Sudhakar Reddy Yakkanti relies on harsh tube lights and washed-out daylight that strips away the romanticism usually applied to North Indian households during family crises. There are no golden hour drone shots of rooftops here, just fluorescent bulbs buzzing overhead in cramped living rooms while relatives argue over property deeds and insurance policies in the background.

Themes of modern alienation versus ancient ritual form the backbone of the narrative, asking whether grief requires a crowd of strangers eating samosas on the lawn or a quiet room with locked doors. The film is at its best when it simply observes the logistical indignities of death in contemporary urban India, where you have to worry about catering bills, cold AC in the prayer hall, and whether the cousin from Canada is going to complain about the mattress firmness. Yet Bahl cannot resist putting a neat little bow on the generational divide by the end, forcing characters to deliver therapeutic monologues that spell out the exact message the audience has already absorbed through two hours of crying and shouting.

Hindi cinema has a long and complicated history with melodrama, and Goodbye tries to update that tradition by replacing traditional tear-jerking violins with a loud, acoustic-heavy soundtrack that won't stop reminding you how to feel every four minutes. Amit Trivedi’s music score works overtime, swelling during the emotional beats until the songs drown out the dialogue entirely. It is a minor technical frustration, but the recurring acoustic theme plays so frequently during the second half that you start anticipating the guitar strum before the characters even begin to tear up. The movie runs nearly two and a half hours, and by the final sequence involving the immersion of ashes in the Ganges, you feel every single minute of that runtime in your lower back.

There is a raw, unpolished energy to the way families treat each other in this story that rings true even when the plot mechanics get clunky and predictable. Nobody waits for the other person to finish their sentence. People talk over each other, dredge up twenty-year-old grievances about wedding gifts during funeral preparations, and storm out of rooms only to come back five minutes later because they forgot their car keys. That specific brand of domestic exhaustion is captured with rare clarity, bypassing easy sentimentality for something much messier and harder to digest. It is uneven, occasionally frustrating, and too long by at least twenty minutes, but it gets the ugly, petty texture of family mourning right in a way that cleaner, more prestigious dramas rarely manage.