Nadaaniyan movie review: Ibrahim Ali Khan, Khushi Kapoor film rehashes every Karan Johar romcom, without his sparkle

It’s not just the school which gets a visual upgrade. The students do too, if their clothes are anything to go by. It’s all very ‘Student Of The Year’, with guys fighting over girls, divided by class: the sole outsider is Arjun Mehta (Ibrahim Ali Khan) who lives in Greater Noida, horror, and has working parents (Jugal Hansraj and Dia Mirza). The rest are tony Delhi’s ‘pampered puttars and bigdail betis’: this is an actual line in the film, not kidding.

Ms P changes her designer outfits and bags in every scene, calling herself ‘a poster princess of privilege and entitlement’, doing our work for us. The Noida, sorry Greater Noida, boy has six packs. We know this because he lifts his T-shirt to show them off, which makes him, for reasons never quite made clear, the best candidate to head the school’s debating team. He also runs, swims, and goes ‘owww’, when poked in the shoulder.

Pia has besties called Rhea and Sahira or is it Saira, who only show up when she’s in the frame, having no lives of their own, of course. She also has parents (Suniel Shetty, Mahima Chaudhary) who aren’t exactly the best of friends. They always wanted a son, and got a daughter. She’s a poor little rich girl, whom no one takes seriously, and that’s her biggest problem.

This is a film which has been created by-and-for hashtags, with zero insights into the demographic it represents. Pia tells Arjun that if he agrees to a hare-brained scheme she’s cooked up to stay in favour with her BFFs, he will get to be ‘on her grid’. Oooh. There are ‘red flags’ and ‘green flags’, ‘elitism’ and ‘classism’, ‘adulting’ and ‘parenting’, phrases which feel are meant to be cool but seem grafted on for attention.

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‘Patriarchy’ rears its ugly head. Pia’s mother speaks of ‘hamaara status aur achccha khandaan’: a jealous suitor who goes by the name of Ayaan Nanda, uses the phrase ‘nawaab nahin naukar’ for Arjun, and is boastful of his command over ‘ladkiyaan, ghadiyaan aur gaadiyaan’. A character is quickly made to retort, ‘haww this is 2024 (the film was clearly finished last year), bringing up ‘toxic masculinity’, but the whole thing comes off as tone deaf, and offensive, in a plot that feels like a rehash of every Karan Johar rom com ever made, without his trademark sparkle.

Khushi Kapoor has a little more to do here than debutant Ibrahim Ali Khan, who is good-looking but single tone. The former has had a couple of films under her belt, plus is given more detailing: the latter can take heart from the fact that his father spent some years doing no-account films and unprepossessing roles before coming into his own. But this is 2025, and there’s justified pushback against constructed, designed artifacts, so Khan Jr is going to have to catch up sooner versus later.

Early on in the film, a character says, omnisciently, this is a terrible idea. If you’d told me that there would be a film that would make me nostalgic, in a good way, about ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’, I would have said, tell me another. But here we are.

Nadaaniyan movie cast: Khushi Kapoor, Ibrahim Ali Khan, Suniel Shetty, Mahima Chaudhary, Jugal Hansraj, Dia Mirza, Archana Puran Singh
Nadaaniyan movie director: Shauna Gautam
Nadaaniyan movie rating: 1 stars