Shubhra Gupta

Given the mad popularity of Colleen Hoover’s novels featuring good-looking adults navigating complicated inter-personal lives, and all the hoo-ha around ‘It Ends With Us’, the first Hoover novel to be filmed, which managed to say something important about domestic violence despite the schmaltz, I had expectations of ‘Regretting You’. ut I should have been warned: just what exactly does ‘regretting you’ mean? In my head, it kept sitting around like ‘Forgetting You’, which is also what this film, based on a Hoover book of the same name, could very easily have been called.

It’s been a few hours since I’ve finished cringe-watching ‘Ek Deewane Ki Deewaniyat’, and I still can’t believe Bollywood is making these films in 2025. I had been hearing about the buzz around the film, and my show was nearly full, which is a change from the usual near-empty theatres I encounter on the first day of the film’s release. And when it started, with Harshvardhan Rane and Sonam Bajwa, getting down to a romantic tangle, I thought I was in for something fresh and inviting. But I was so, so wrong.

Yet another Maddock stable offering, with the by-now familiar fix of the natural and supernatural, risque humour, in-house jokes, meta-movie references and item numbers, Thamma goes one better, by giving us not one but two of those. And a heavier star slate than before, with a combo of Ayushmann Khurrana and Rashmika Mandanna, playing a pair of star-crossed lovers whose romance is overseen by betaals and bhediyaas and other mythological creatures. But I have to sadly report that the law of diminishing returns has clearly set in, in the work of a director who gave us the comparatively perky ‘Munjya’ and ‘Kakuda’: there is so little that engages in this crowded canvas, written by Niren Bhatt, Suresh Mathew and Afrun Falara, that the result is a pair of hurting ears and glazed eyes.

Exactly twenty years back, Arshad Warsi had played an upright cop in one of his finest films, ‘Sehar’. We had seen him in mostly comic roles up until then, and this ramrod straight policeman was a welcome departure, posting notice that he could do serious as well as jokey, turning him one of those performers whose presence invariably betters the movies they are in.

It’s Sankyukta Das’s last day at work at her cop station; she is headed to another city, and a desk job, which will give her more time with her husband-and-daughter-and-mother, all of whom gets pushed aside when it comes to the most important thing in her life: the work at hand. This, as it turns out, in the first part of the show comprising six episodes, is the discovery of a dead girl in a local politician’s campaign car. Family commitments will have to wait, as Sanyukta dives into assembling her team, while having to deal with barely-hidden barbs from a smug new entrant to her team Jai Kanwal (Surya Sharma), who thinks he knows better.

Two unlikely couples find themselves in a house far away from the madding crowd in the English countryside. It’s meant to be a convivial dinner, getting to know each other better. But right from the time they are ushered in by their hosts Rohit (Arjun Mathur) and Sanya (Zora Rahman), Ira (Rasika Dugal) and Basukinath (Paresh Pahuja) sense there’s something off: a big chest, placed in the middle of the living room. It becomes an object of increasing concern: what is inside? Or is it who? Is there, shudder, a body inside?

Wedding crashers. Five star Rajasthan hotels. Brand endorsements for glittery apparel. And not to forget the most important element, shiny baubles standing in for characters: Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari settles creakily back in the sangeet-sagaai-shaadi template awash with star-crossed lovers and their parivarik conflicts. In short, everything we’ve seen before, in multiple iterations, over the years, because that’s literally all mainstream Bollywood rom coms seem capable of these days. Even the usage of the word ‘situationship’ feels familiar, even when it is mouthed by Ananya (Sanya Malhotra) to describe the thing between her and Sunny (Varun Dhawan): why should only boys have all the fun? She was his, and now she’s not, and he needs to deal with it, even as a BFF Bantu (Abhinav Sharma) shoulder comes in handy. Of course, there’s a bestie; how else will heroes be propped up?

The film opens with two young men, Chandan and Shoaib, making their way into the centre of a heaving crowd, creating space for themselves. The location is a train station, from where they hope to be borne away, yearning for the ‘ijjat’, and ‘paisa’ which will allow them the dignity they have clearly been deprived of all their lives.