The sound design on the train station scene at the forty-minute mark of Ishqeria is completely out of whack, the ambient crowd chatter drowning out dialogue so badly you have to lean forward and squint at the screen even with the subtitles on. If I'm honest, it's a small thing that bugged me, but it sets the tone for a project that often feels like it was mixed in a broom closet by someone who had somewhere else to be. That kind of technical sloppiness shouldn't surprise anyone who has tracked the delayed releases of this particular corner of indie cinema, where movies sit on hard drives for years before creeping out into the world with zero fanfare and even less quality control. You sit there in the dark, or in front of your laptop monitor if you're watching this via a streaming drop that nobody covered in the trades, wondering how a picture with this much visible effort in the casting room ends up feeling so structurally unglued.

Prerna Wadhawan steps into the director's chair with an unmistakable fondness for the chaotic, sun-bleached texture of middle-class university life, capturing cramped hostel rooms and dusty corridors with an authenticity that keeps the narrative from drifting off completely. The screenplay, however, labors under the weight of its own protracted delays, dragging characters through repetitive emotional loops that feel like they belong to a completely different decade of Hindi films. Characters constantly arrive at decisions, unmake those decisions in the next scene, and then re-arrive at the exact same conclusion with glazed expressions. It's a frustrating rhythm that defeats momentum, turning what should be a snappy campus romance into a grueling endurance test of back-and-forth misunderstandings. Think of how tightly Anusha Rizvi managed the sprawling chaos of Peepli Live without losing the thread, and you'll immediately spot the loose screws here where scenes stretch out four beats past their dramatic expiration date just to pad the runtime.

Richa Chadha does not get nearly enough credit for playing against her usual gritty, street-smart archetype, slipping into a softer persona with a quiet desperation that occasionally saves the picture from its own worst instincts. She finds subtle shading in moments where the dialogue threatens to curdle into pure cliché, using small, defensive adjustments of her posture and quick, sideways glances to communicate a history that the script never quite gets around to writing for her. Manish Anand, opposite her, struggles to locate the center of his character, drifting between brooding aloofness and sudden bursts of inexplicable warmth without a bridge to connect the two modes. It makes their central romance feel less like an inevitable collision and more like an administrative error orchestrated by an indifferent screenwriter. Juby Devasia pops up in the background as the obligatory loyal friend, delivering every line with a theatrical brio that belongs on a proscenium stage rather than in a medium close-up, though you can't fault the actor for trying to inject some pulse into a scene that has already flatlined.

The visual language swings wildly between evocative handheld photography that catches the sweat and grit of urban hostels and flat, brightly lit sequences that resemble a mid-budget soap opera broadcast on a Tuesday afternoon. Cinematographer Manoj Lobo clearly had a good eye for the golden hour glow of North Indian campuses, yet those aesthetic triumphs keep getting interrupted by clumsy continuity cuts and color-grading shifts that suggest the footage was graded across multiple years using different software packages. The soundtrack fares slightly better, even if the primary love theme gets recycled three too many times during montage sequences that are supposed to convince us the leads are falling deeply in love despite talking to each other for a combined total of twenty minutes of screen time. It's the kind of score that tells you what to feel with sledgehammer obviousness, robbing the actors of the opportunity to discover those emotions organically.

Beneath the surface romantic turbulence, the film attempts to grapple with the rigid class anxieties that govern modern courtship in tier-two Indian cities, showing how easily personal ambition can curdle into quiet resentment when partners find themselves moving at different speeds. This is where the movie actually connects, far away from the manufactured dramatic crises and the sluggish pacing, touching upon the very real terror of outgrowing the person you once swore you couldn't live without. Bollywood movies have tackled this specific brand of heartbreak for decades, yet there is something uniquely poignant about seeing it rendered in a minor-key indie that lacks the gloss of a major studio intervention. You recognize the compromises these characters are forced to make because they mirror the compromises happening in living rooms all over the country every single weekend.

Ishqeria is not great, not bad, just there, taking up space in a crowded digital marketplace where half-finished passion projects go to quietly expire. It frustrates because you can see the distinct shape of a much sharper, funnier movie buried underneath the flab and the post-production compromises, waiting for an editor with a pair of heavy shears. You leave the experience without feeling particularly cheated of your time, yet entirely uninspired to recommend it to anyone else, perfectly content to let it drift back into the dusty archives from whence it crawled.