Metro... in Dino

Seventeen years after he tugged heartstrings with Life in a… Metro, Anurag Basu and Pritam are back navigating love in the big city, or should we say cities. The stories this time shift between Bengaluru, New Delhi and Calcutta. For Metro… In Dino, Basu adopts a less-seen, interesting narrative device to lure viewers into the world: characters introducing themselves by way of sing-song dialogue delivery. There’s Sara Ali Khan’s Chumki professing she’s confused and unsure; there’s Konkona SenSharma’s Kajol discussing her insipid marital life; there’s Anupam Kher, playing a widower, opening up about losing his loved ones in an accident; there’s Ali Fazal’s aspiring singer sharing his struggles. And there’s Pritam, Papon and Raghav Chaitanya, the travelling troubadours in the backdrop. Offering a peek into a character’s current state of mind and establishing their world, the first half breezes past.

Few filmmakers aim as high as Anurag Basu. The striving is driven more by curiosity than ambition — the desire to see what can be achieved when a story is set to music and punctuated with whimsy. The symphony is rapturous but not guaranteed, making his storytelling both messy and distinct. Inconsistent as this might be, it can also be rewarding: the highs in his films are so potent that the lesser moments are frustrated and elevated in anticipation Metro… In Dino is no exception. Basu’s feature is characteristically chaotic, buzzing with the cacophony of a crowd and beating with a single heart. It has the levity and longing of his later style and bleeds more than builds. It carries the hurt of unspoken words and the humour of saying it aloud. A spiritual sequel to Life in a… Metro, Basu’s latest has similar vibes but differs in spirit. If the 2007 film was concerned with the loneliness of citied existence then Metro… In Dino is about the cities we carry within ourselves.

In the ceaseless hum of city life, where buildings scrape the skies and dreams stretch further still, Anurag Basu returns to familiar terrain—with unfamiliar faces and untold tales. Metro… In Dino is less a sequel than a kindred spirit to Life in a… Metro (2007), that elegiac hymn to urban loneliness and love. Where the earlier film rode on the late Irrfan Khan’s quiet gravitas, this one blooms with a new ensemble of characters—a tapestry woven with fresh threads but dyed in the same bittersweet hues of metropolitan melancholy. If love is a constant, it is so not because of its predictability, but because it defies time, space, and season. That is the foundational pulse of Metro… In Dino: the unbelievable becomes believable, the mundane profound. Basu doesn’t just craft stories—he paints atmospheres, where cityscapes become emotional landscapes, and each window, each narrow alley, tells a tale of yearning. This spiritual successor traces the contours of contemporary relationships—fractured, ephemeral, tender, and quietly devastating—against the backdrops of Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Bangalore, cities not just as settings but as sentient beings. They breathe, they pulse, they ache along with the lovers they cradle.

You’d think Anurag Basu would want to steer as clear of Jagga Jasoos as possible. Yet, the opening of Metro In Dino runs towards that wildly ambitious and notoriously unsuccessful 2017 film with open arms. It’s a true-blue musical sequence: multiple stories, conversational vocals, passing nimbly from character to character. In a film suffused with romantic gestures, this might be the ultimate one. At a time when Hindi directors are trying to make the least musical musicals possible, Basu wants to give viewers the 100-proof version. Basu’s career can be divided into two neat halves: the turbulent love stories from Saaya (2003) to Kites (2010), and then, Barfi (2012) onwards, the embrace of colour and whimsy. Metro In Dino takes its structure from a key first-half work, 2007’s Life In a Metro, but it’s rendered in his later lush style. It’s loving, playful, affecting, overstuffed—all the things that come with watching a Anurag Basu film.

When Anurag Basu made Life in a….Metro (2007) it was like a fresh breeze of air. The narratives of individuals within a city possessed a unique charm, and the storytelling effectively captured your interest. Metro… In Dino serves as a spiritual sequel to that film, adhering to the same format of an anthology of stories. However, with a runtime exceeding 160 minutes, it loses momentum in the latter half, undermining the foundations laid in the first half.

When the opening song itself gives you sharp snapshots of its lead characters, a whole battery of them, you wonder where the story can go from there. More importantly, as ‘Metro… in Dino’, a sequel of ‘Life in a Metro’, marks its date with the silver screen nearly 18 years after the beautiful prequel won our hearts, you also marvel at what more can the writer-director Anurag Basu offer. Though the film’s title literally means “metro these days”, have love and relationships really transformed in these two decades that we deserve yet another dose of it? Yes, we are made to believe, when we meet Sara Ali Khan’s Chumki, who sings “meri dasha hai confusion”. She alone is not emblematic of the new-world values of modern-day romance. Aditya Roy Kapur’s commitment-phobic Parth hops from one relationship to another.

The heart has been craving for a good old love story amid heavy actioners that Bollywood has been churning out for some time now. Amid the clutter of Pan-India gruesome bloodied action thrillers and sappy family dramas that the viewers have been fed the past few years, Anurag Basu’s Metro…In Dino manages to break the clutter with a fresh take on the oldest emotion in the universe -Love. Basu takes four distinct love stories set in cities like Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore and spins an intricate tale, typical of the filmmaker’s style of storytelling. The result is an engaging musical 2 hr 42 minutes long ride at theatres.