Cast: Ahaan Pandey, Aneet Pada
Director: Mohit Suri
Platform: In Cinemas
Rating out 5: ★★★
Saiyaara is a coming-of-age romance set against the confused, high-gloss haze of Delhi’s elite youth and is sometimes touching, sometimes tender, and sometimes leave a bad taste in the back of your throat.
Mohit Suri wants to tap the old magic of youthful romance, heartbreak, music and melancholy. The leads are new: Aneet Padda and Ahaan Panday, both unreleased talents thrust into Bollywood’s arena. Their debut is sturdy, their chemistry palpable, and it’s Aneet who steals nearly every scene she’s in.
Padda as Vaani Batra, a poet, an aspiring journalist, later the keeper of his song brings quiet gravity to a story that threatens to drown in its own melodrama. She’s not playing expectations; she’s living them. It’s how her eyes narrow when she reads someone’s lyrics, how her voice cracks when she confronts Krish. Her portrayal is literate and layered never reduced to the archetypes so many debutantes inherit and she grounds the narrative in tangible, fragile truth.
Panday as Krish Kapoor is charismatic on first blush: the aspiring rock self-conscious musician, all attitude and ambition. He strikes notes well enough, delivers the obligatory slow-motion center-stage reveal. Yet beneath that charisma smoulders something uglier: possessiveness, emotional volatility, gaslighting. He finds Vaani’s poetry, turns it into songs, makes her the muse then subtly frames it as ownership. In scenes that should feel romantic, there’s instead whispered manipulation: guilt laced as tenderness, jealousy couched in care. And the audience is nudged, again, toward the idea that this is love in its most intense form.
That portrayal unsettles me. It’s not surprising in the context of Bollywood’s tradition of romanticising the brooding male protagonist. But it’s troubling. Ahaan’s character flirts with violent undercurrents emotional violence, psychological pressure that the script never interrogates. The film allows Vaani’s shock when Krish flips from poetic to punitive. The heavier disconnect, she attempts to conceal her illness. But his control remains unchecked until the climax.
That all said, the early romance between them, before the diagnosis, is believable. Electricity between them sparked through creativity and mutual respect. The song “Saiyaara” and others from the soundtrack do propel the emotional arc but they don’t stall it. And their chemistry, though warped, is undeniable. Mohit Suri knows how to build mood, and if the foundations feel shaky, he still manages to frame loss with intimacy.
But against that, Padda’s Vaani fights. She retreats, disappears, shares the lyrics she writes even while leaving his life. She vanishes into guilt. And when Krish eventually recreates a memory to jar her recognition, it’s deliberate and fragile. He isn’t a rescuer; he’s an anchor. And Vaani’s recognition of him is tentative. That emotional return is more moving than any Bollywood breakdown could render.
The supporting cast is necessary, serviceable, but little more. Her parents, his father, ex-boyfriend Mahesh someone trying to exploit her forgotten identity are present but never propelled beyond plot device. Even the ex-fiancé character exists as a threat to drama more than love. There’s empathy in the set pieces, but not much room for them to breathe.
Visually, Saiyaara is dreamy. The canvas of first love and heartbreak is painted in pastel-lighted Delhi streets, misty Manali hills, the faded glow of cafes at dusk. It’s familiar territory for the emotional romantic musical, but it’s executed well enough that you buy into the heightened reality.
The pacing drags at times first half establishes the spark, second half stutter-stepping through diagnosis and memory loss. The film clocks over two hours, and by the end you wonder if one strong edit on the middle section could have given it sharper focus. Drama and music episodes feel episodic, sometimes overscored, so that emotion is suggested rather than earned.
Still, there’s promise. Padda brings raw authenticity. Their chemistry in the beginning feels earned. The music is sometimes is genuinely moving, weaving heartache and soundtrack into shared currency. Sometimes the songs carry the film more than the screenplay ever commits.
I came away from Saiyaara thinking: here’s a debut lead pair worth watching going forward. And here’s a film that tries to explore the humbling crisis of memory and identity, with some lyricism. But it trips over old romantic conventions when it comes to Krish’s behaviour glossing over his emotional toxicity, letting possessiveness pass for passion. That’s a narrative choice that’s lazy at best, dangerous at worst.
Three stars out of five. One for the chemistry between the strangers made luminous by debut innocence, one for Aneet Padda’s grounded, luminous performance, and one for the moments of genuine heartbreak. But for every heartfelt refrain, there’s also a problematic chord. A romance rooted in forgetting and remembering, but weighted unevenly by how it treats love, control, and consent. You walk away wanting more accountability in how love is shown.
