Tere Ishk Mein: Aanand L Rai’s woman-hating film doesn’t grant any grace to Kriti Sanon, but allows ‘hero’ Dhanush to burn someone alive

When Rai introduces Mukti (Kriti Sanon), he presents her almost as a tease. She is shown as the seductress who is disrupting Shankar’s (Dhanush) life just by being there. He presents Shankar’s anger as a part of his personality, even though it has him acting like a violent beast, but assigns the job of his transformation to Mukti. In these first few minutes, the film makes it clear that it is Mukti who sees Shankar’s issues as a problem so it is up to her to fix him, and absolves him of all responsibility.

For most of the first act, Rai presents Mukti as the kind of woman who is leading Shankar on with an unsaid promise of being with him once he ‘changes’. The changes never happen because a tiger can’t change its stripes but Mukti is declared to be a vamp anyway, who has ruined his life, even though he was literally a regular at the local police station before she met him. If that wasn’t enough, Rai rubs salt in Shankar’s wounds when he makes Mukti call him over to her IAS father’s house for some unnecessary humiliation. In all of this, Shankar is always presented as someone who is reacting to his situation, and the creator of the said situation is Mukti.

Dhanush plays a hooligan who is never asked to take responsibility of his actions.

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Rai keeps up the illusion that it is Mukti’s love that is pushing Shankar to do something worthwhile with his life but that’s not the case. Shankar is a lost, directionless hooligan who has never worked a day in his life so when he is finally assigned a near-impossible task, the film questions Mukti for not holding her end of the bargain. Shankar nearly immolates an innocent bystander but Rai shows it as his expression of love, and tasks Mukti with reigning in a wild horse. He sets her up to fail while ragebaiting Shankar and the audience at the same time by making sure that Mukti has no redeeming qualities.

This vamp-ification of Mukti is not just limited to her potential as Shankar’s partner, but it extends to her being a horrible woman. Rai and his writers show that Shankar’s issues stem from the untimely death of his mother so they directly project that on Mukti. She is presented as an irresponsible mother who drinks throughout her pregnancy. She has failed as a mother even before her child is born. She is somehow placed as the trigger leading to his father’s death as the director completely overlooks the plight of a 60-something-year-old man who is putting up with an unemployed 20-something-year-old son, who regularly gets arrested because of his anger issues.

Some crazy events in the plot (which honestly cannot be explained by anyone with a few brain cells) somehow lead them to a point where Mukti has to clear Shankar for combat during a war (he is now an IAF officer) and here too, she is the vamp who is not letting him serve his country. Even in that hair-brained plot, the writers declare that Mukti is the sole obstacle that stands between India’s ‘best pilot’ and his duty. The film never pauses to ponder that Shankar has landed in this mess because of his own anger issues.

From the beginning, Rai tasks Mukti with fixing Shankar and blames her when she fails to do so.

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Mukti is also the vamp in Jassi’s (Paramvir Cheema) life, a character that barely has 5 lines in the film, for she strings him along for no explicable reason. Even in the capacity of a daughter, Mukti is shown as a failure as it is fully implied that she has led her dad into a coma. This vamp-ification is concluded when, in the end, Shankar dies in an attempt to save her husband Jassi, who is also the father of her child.

It is impossible to defend Mukti because the creators of her character don’t want a defence for her. They want a woman who can be blamed for an unstable man’s death. They don’t want him to inspect his own actions, or introduce anyone in his life who can make him introspect, because it is so much easier to blame a woman for a ‘hero’s’ downfall. As the audience, you are asked to believe in the mystic nature of love and not ask any logical questions but it’s not possible for a rational thinking human to watch Tere Ishk Mein and wonder how many impressionable boys and girls will watch this and believe this to be an acceptable expression of love.

Kriti Sanon’s Mukti is not a fully formed character, she is a punching bag for the creators.

As you spend three hours watching this incel fest, it dawns upon you that Tere Ishk Mein is the portrait of disillusioned youth that has gone astray. It makes you wonder how the education system has failed them, even in the film’s universe. Rai must have justified this as some kind of cinematic liberty but the education system in this film is a joke. A law student studying at Delhi University can’t tell the difference between CBSE and UPSC, and a PhD scholar trying to get her doctorate is experimenting on a human being as she goes along. You almost wonder if people making this film ever went to an educational institution.

That’s when you realise that they didn’t make this film for themselves, or people they know, they made it for the impressionable youth who are yet to experience life. They designed it for boys and girls who are young enough to romanticise the idea of pain in the name of love, and are now sermonising that the woman can easily be blamed for everything that goes wrong in a man’s life.

Dhanush’s character dies at the end of the film, and with this, Aanand L Rai completes the vampi-ification of Kriti Sanon’s Mukti.

Years have been spent dissecting the works of Sandeep Reddy Vanga, but Rai has surpassed him by all measures. Shankar does not make Mukti lick his shoe (like Animal), or slap her (like Kabir Singh), but he does something much worse. He presents a playbook as to how to exonerate a man from all responsibility for his own actions, and blame it all on the woman.

Cinema is meant to be a conversation-starter, but if the conversation is steered by men who set the rules of this universe, then it loses all objectivity and credibility. Dhanush’s Shankar is a martyr in Rai’s eyes and he treats him like a ‘raja beta’ who can do no wrong. It’s only the woman who bears the burden of fixing him.