Gehrayiyaan Movie Review: Technical failure anchored by some good acting

TW: Mentions of anxiety // The film includes a depiction of suicide.

There is exactly one (1) movie poster pasted on the wall facing my bed. It is a glossy A4-size print of the 2019 multi-starrer Super Deluxe. While it does remain one of my favourite pieces of cinema, the primary reasons for putting up only that particular poster in my room is the brilliant design and edit work on it, and it featuring Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa in the foreground. Both ideas the most constant in my thoughts while watching Gehrayiyaan.

Directed by Shakun Batra, who previously had helmed the very delicate and hauntingly accurate Kapoor and Sons, Gehrayiyaan at one level is constantly trying to set itself up as a mirror to its predecessor. That movie was about two brothers set in a hillstation, this film is about two (cousin) sisters and features a beach house. That film starred Ratna Pathak Shah as a mother who misunderstood her children. This one features her husband as a misunderstood father. Both films feature a twist that is revealed in the climax, a Rajat Kapoor character I constantly want to punch on the face, and a rich girl named Tia.

Unlike Kapoor & Sons, Gehrayiyaan has one central character, and everyone else exists in relation to her, or in relation to those who only exist in relation to her. Alisha (Deepika Padukone) is a Yoga instructor looking to raise funds for an app who almost instantly falls for her cousin Tia’s (Ananya Panday) fiance Zain (Siddhant Chaturvedi) after feeling unloved and uncared for in her six-year-long relationship with Karan (Dhairya Karwa). What follows is a series of Prateek Kuhad music videos (directed by Dar Gai), distractingly unsynchronised dubbing, terrible green screen editing, and a million Great Waves.

At one level, Gehrayiyaan is constantly trying to set itself up as a mirror to its predecessor. At a deeper level, the film drowns in its own reflections.

Trying to not repeat what has already been done before is possibly a commendable principle to live by, but in attempting to strictly follow this dictum, Shakun Batra’s latest film falters miserably and at multiple counts. For instance, in focusing on building the entire movie around mostly a single character, the writers have made semi-caricatures of the others. There are also multiple simple common-sense errors in the script which no one at any stage of production seemed to double-check. The plot of the film is overwhelmingly shallow, and even the big twist which comes at the end of the climax is predictable barely halfway into the movie.

In his note on the music album of the film, Prathyush Parasuraman writes about the music created to cater to their Instagrammability, and how much of the songs’ popularity depended on being suitable for Instagram Reels of all moods and colors. Stylistically, at least two-thirds of the movie itself feels like a compilation of Reels by homogenous rich posh users of the app. All the characters are fit and polished and wear the same clothes, there isn’t almost any worker-character in the movie despite multiple shots of factories and hotels and yachts, and it involves a lot of new-age anglophonic Indian Indie Music.

Amidst all this is Deepika’s stellar turn as an anxiety-ridden woman determined to have some control and not let her past catch up with her. For much of the movie, her performance valiantly tries to singlehandedly make you forget the other unbearable aspects of its craft. She enjoys good support from Rajat Kapoor and Naseeruddin Shah, and there is some hint of good chemistry even in her non-song sequences with Siddhant Chaturvedi.

I stare at the Super Deluxe poster in my room. In my mind, Hokusai’s painting on the poster has morphed into the waves of the movie, roaring and gushing at my screen every seven to ten minutes. I proceed to switch off my light.