Tere Ishk Mein review: Dhanush and Kriti Sanon wade through a dense, chaotic drama

Shankar is from a lower-middle-class Tamil-speaking family in Delhi, raised by his single father (played by Prakash Raj), who toiled as a notary agent. Mukti grew up in Lutyens’ bungalows in the same city, raised by another single father (Tota Roy Chowdhury) who toured the world as an IAS officer with her daughter. Aukat is, indeed, a bridge that both crossed halfway, but at cruelly separate points when the other was either looking away, or had begun walking back with anger/resignation.

However, the line itself is a tacit message that director Aanand L. Rai and his two writers, Himanshu Sharma and Neeraj Yadav, want to convey to the viewer of 2025. I don’t suppose they mean to target a particular age group with it, but rather a time when love, more as a demonstration than a feeling, is increasingly too level-headed, self-aware and yielding according to them.

The trio wants love to pine achingly, to scream with a shrill, to cut its wrist, to let its feet soak in the dripping blood and to let it burn in the pyre it has constructed for itself, if need be. It could be tender at birth and promising in its adolescence, but when it comes of age, it must throb and become an emblem that elicits a history, and not just any past that is interchangeable, that is erasable. “Waqt hum sabko baniya bana deta hai,” is Shankar’s preceding statement, suggesting how daily life’s hustles turn love into a transaction. His penchant for platitudes is passable at first, but when they end up masking the toxicity of his actions, the underlying problem doesn’t remain hidden for long.

Emotion over logic

Tere Ishk Mein chooses to make its characters recite couplets instead of speaking normal lines and ask only questions of each other instead of answering the ones that already hang in the air. It chooses a setting that is modern and where communication is terribly easy, but then deliberately diverts from its cadence to come across soulful, confusing and illogical at once. Mukti could have opted for any reliable candidate for her PhD thesis on how violence could be removed from the human body “like an appendix”. Yet, her purview stays limited to Shankar for some reason, whose aimless existence breeds only violence and unruliness because of the deep childhood trauma he carries.

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She tells him very clearly at the beginning of their professional tryst that she doesn’t see any romance blooming between them. He responds by saying that he is willing to walk that path alone in sheer hope. She refers to him as dost at one point and loves him deeply as one, whereas he translates her soothing presence in his life as companionship he couldn't let go of. She doesn’t lead him on at any point, but fears from letting him know that because she fears the damage his misplaced intensity can cause. And he feels led on because of the unequipped emotional intelligence that doesn’t let him be intuitive or remain within the boundaries of acceptable behaviour; something to note in this regard would be his physical expression towards Mukti escalating into physical abuse at times — grabbing her by the throat and hair, aside from the constant mental harassment — and the film ought to have done the least it could to address and censure it.

There are several moments during and after this significant portion of the film that make you wonder if there were simpler methods to solve the complications arising between the two characters. Or, do not let any complications breed in the first place. Couldn’t Mukti’s dominant, politically powerful father (Chowdhury) have easily dealt with him after this young “nobody” repeatedly encroaches upon his and his daughter’s space (this particular bit is where the practical logic fails completely because Shankar manages to bypass the Z-category security at Mukti’s house multiple times, without breaking a sweat)?

Why does Mukti take such a winding, frustratingly implausible route to realise what her true feelings are? Why don’t the two of them find one opportunity — a precious, solitary one — to speak with each other like adults? Why does everything come down to gestures and sacrifices? And why does he get away so easily with his manipulative conduct? The answer to these and many other conundrums is easily available, if the real-world logic is applied to it, and it is likely that the makers of the film, too, are aware of that option. The answer becomes complicated when the other logic, the one that has now to define Aanand L. Rai and Himanshu Sharma’s collectively, vibrantly convoluted worldview, is applied. Tere Ishk Mein is tethered to the emotional and social landscape we all are part of, but its reasoning is its own: it wants to be frighteningly committed to the ethos of love it believes in, just as Shankar does throughout.

Mesmeric music

The results of this kind of pursuit are mildly promising at times, but they soon tend to be quite frustrating because these curiosities were already found in Raanjhanaa (2013). The boy’s (named Kundan Shankar) near-unanimous perspective of the relationship, previously, drowned out who the girl clearly is and what she is feeling towards his feverish antics. There, too, the themes were grand and admirable, but their treatment was uneven and, at times, lacklustre.

Both Kundan and Shankar feel self-pity beyond an acceptable point, and cause serious harm to others around them. Yet, the guilt they feel within barely fits the crime, and the reparations they make on the road to ‘mukti’ or salvation are problematic, insufficient; Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub appears in the new film as a clear nod to his role as Murari in Raanjhanaa, and while his cameo injects energy into the narrative, it still doesn’t free it from its limited gaze.

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What Tere Ishk Mein does instead is extend the wallowing tendencies to its female lead. Mukti’s psychological spiral-down highlights two important facets of her relationship with Shankar: one, as pointed out already, that she couldn’t figure out what she wanted (in an Imtiaz Ali-esque manner) at the right time, and the other that she and Shankar could almost never find each other on the same page.

This pivot is interesting until it becomes confusing and then gradually one-dimensional, simply because the way she chooses to deal with her problems, and the way she arrives at that choice, aren’t convincing enough. Kriti Sanon does a fine job with the role by imbuing it with a lot of relatability, and her onscreen compatibility (not chemistry) with Dhanush works well despite the unchecked aggression in the writing. They both get their respective characters, which are demanding in terms of visible intensity and not so much in terms of restraint, but you also wish for some quiet in the film that becomes too nervy and sentimental for its own good.

Who the film really belongs to is A.R Rahman, who returns to his mesmeric and audacious best as a composer. Aanand L. Rai is a visual storyteller in every sense of the word, and he also boasts a strong grip on the Hindi language and its regional textures. When the two come together, the film oozes a lyrical rhythm (lyricist Irshad Kamil is not to be forgotten here): the way cinematographer Tushar Kanti Ray juxtaposes a wedding celebration with the ‘colourful’ grimness of the Banarasi ghats over the song Aawaara Angaara. The way the most momentous time of Shankar’s life is captured on an airstrip as the wistful Usey Kehna underscores it. Or the way Shilpa Rao punctuates the film with her version of the title track (named Tere Zikr Mein): Tere Ishk Mein springs to life in these moments to such a degree that they nearly make you forget everything else. The film, if for nothing else, could be watched just for this confluence.