In the opening stretch of Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya, a robotics programmer named Aryan (Shahid Kapoor) has a dream that he lifts the veil off his bride and she turns out to be a robot. As it turns out, dreams do come true. Aryan goes abroad and visits his aunt Urmila (Dimple Kapadia), who owns the company he works for. She leaves him in the company of her manager, Sifra (Kriti Sanon). The woman can cook up a storm, she can make black coffee exactly the way Aryan likes it, and she even has the internal fan fitted into all Bollywood heroines to give their hair those wind-caressed waves. No wonder Aryan is smitten. He falls for her, makes love to her, and then discovers that she is a robot. This is not a spoiler. I checked the trailer, and this reveal is in there. So far, so good. In Splash, Tom Hanks fell for a mermaid. In rom-com-land, anything goes…
… as long as there is “rom” and there is “com”. Alas, that is not the case here. Amit Joshi & Aradhana Sah are writers and directors, and watching this flat film, you want to ask them: Where is the romance? Shahid and Kriti are not bad, but their so-called relationship has all the depth and weight of a microchip. There is a character trait established early on that Aryan is very picky, and that he needs, um, robotic levels of precision even in his coffee and breakfast. Why not extend this trait to say that Aryan is attracted to Sifra because she gives him levels of perfection no mere human can hope to. We get this explanation at the very end, with a special guest star, and it is too late. What should have been built into the romance is reduced to a few lines of dialogue, like the “moral of the story”.
So if you don’t want to dive deep into the “rom” part, what about the “com”? At one point, Aryan brings Sifra home to his great Indian family, and they are delighted that she can do everything an ideal “bahu” can, plus look drop-dead beautiful. It’s too much to ask for a satire on how the traditional daughter-in-law in a joint family is essentially a programmed robot – but at least, give us some laughs. And not the kind where one of Aryan’s relatives mispronounces “hamari bahu” as “harami bahu”, to the accompaniment of sitcom-data-style slapstick music. With the big Indian family, there are so many possibilities for humour. Heck, they just needed to feed Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Bawarchi or Khubsoorat or Chupke Chupke into ChatGPT, and half the screenplay would have generated itself.
Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya is one of those films that’s content that it has a unique one-line. There’s zero follow-up, and it’s puzzling that an actor of Shahid’s calibre chose to star in it. Maybe he wanted a paid vacation after the heavy-duty lifting he had to do in Kabir Singh and Jersey – but still! The only sensible character here is Urmila, and Dimple Kapadia delivers a splendid, no-nonsense performance – but a supporting actor cannot carry a movie that turns into a sort-of ghost story by the end. Watching the utterly uninteresting non-events on screen, I kept thinking of alternate scenarios. Why not save the Sifra-is-a-robot reveal for later? Why reveal it in the trailer, in the first place? Wouldn’t that have made us think two real people were falling in love, only to have the rug pulled out from under our feet? Or why not have Sifra develop real feelings for Aryan? It’s bad enough to sit through bad movies. It’s worse when the film’s premise indicates that it could have been good.