Newcomers Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda sparkle in director Mohit Suri’s return to form
But Vaani’s pre-interval diagnosis flips the genre’s main-character-energy problem on its head. It challenges the romanticised aggression of someone like Krish. Suddenly, he’s not the focus. The story forces him to submit and be selfless, a trait that goes against all that he symbolises to an audience who’ve been seduced by his entitlement. The irony of their situation turns him from a vain hero who makes art to be remembered into a fragile lover whose fear is to be forgotten. The person he becomes in the second half is in service of a girl whose trauma is pronounced enough to erase the past and consume the future — including their little fairytale. The spotlight fades. It’s a moving update in a film that, in its own sellable way, subverts the relationship between love and longing. Krish has to work harder to be a soulmate than to be famous. He not only finds himself having to share the agency of romance, his craft becomes their north star: he has to be heard to be seen.
The script resorts to some clumsy things, like re-introducing Vaani’s evil ex-boyfriend to heighten the drama of her disease, but it works in more of a big-picture manner. The creative license used to depict the condition is, for once, entirely justified because of how it reverses the idea of sacrifice, caregiving and saviour syndromes. Suri has a knack for filming songs as an extension of the mental landscape (remember the one-shot rampage towards the end of ‘Zaroorat’ in Ek Villain?). At one point, the title track of Saiyaara — earwormy in the most Vishesh Films-coded way — shows a neat time-lapse montage, where Krish’s moping continues in shots stitched across concert venues. At another point, Krish runs and collapses in a stadium, ending up as a silhouette against a pixelated photo of Vaani’s eyes on a jumbotron. These moments reveal an uncanny mix of massy entertainment and artistic ambition that Suri — and several 2000s-Emraan-Hashmi-coded pretenders — veered away from in the last decade.
Aneet Padda, who stood out in the middling show Big Girls Don’t Cry (2024), lends a kind of literary sheen to a woman that might have easily been reduced to a coming-of-age device in someone else’s journey. Her Vaani spends a chunk of time looking sad and pretty and disoriented, but Padda plays her with the awareness of a protagonist who struggles to accept the burden of being one. The film opens with her (not him) arriving for a court marriage — as a central character determined to write her own destiny (she’s literally scribbling in her diary), until she runs out of paper. There are shades of Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai’s weepy Sonia in New Zealand before she meets Krish who, like Hrithik Roshan’s Raj, zooms past her on a slick motorbike.
Speaking of Roshan (and Krish), Ahaan Panday’s debut is the sort of vintage, star-making turn where screen presence alone offsets his character’s lack of guile. There’s something about him — it’s perhaps too early to tell despite the perfect casting — that humanises the big-screen manchild in a generation that knows no middle-ground between performative wokeness and toxicity. He’s consistently watchable, even in the awkward stage shows, and makes a case for the nostalgia of hero gestures. You remember Krish’s sprints, brooding body language and desperate boyishness more than his outbursts or lone-tear meltdowns. It’s a refreshing change to see someone from a film family use their inherent Bollywood-ness as a strength rather than a weakness. His chemistry with Padda is the stuff dream launches (and viral reels) are made of. In his Krish, the curated charm of being a boyfriend jostles with the grief of trying to be a memorable one.
While exiting the Mumbai cinema hall with a bunch of college-goers on a Friday morning, I felt a bit embarrassed to be choking up and wiping my face. I was probably the oldest there, but it was soothing to hear a symphony of muffled sobs around me. I wondered why my emotions betrayed me towards the end. Was it because a plot with Alzheimer’s — my mother was recently diagnosed — hit too close to home? Was it the end-credits sequence? Was it because of how successfully the movie toyed with our famished sensibilities? Maybe. But as I write this review, I realise that the answer is far more primal: Saiyaara simply allows us to rediscover the lost art of feeling — melancholy, relief, yearning, nostalgia, whatever — without compromising on who we are. It’s been a while since a commercial love story — or any kind of story, really — let me unlearn the toll of growing up and feel like one of those college kids again. For a few hours, I became that teenager who listened to Toh Phir Aao (from a film whose name I never cared to remember) on loop and strived to be angsty. Back when emotions didn’t betray but belonged. Then I snapped back to being an adult humming the background score of Saiyaara, a movie about bleeding hearts and catchy music.
