Nadaaniyan Movie Review: Cringe Max
Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Maybe AI taking over everybody’s job isn’t such a bad thing – an AI-generated actor might’ve emoted better than half the cast of Nadaaniyan. Remember Megan, the robot from the horror film M3GAN? She was definitely a lot more entertaining to watch than the humans in this movie.
Directed by Shauma Gautam, and written by more than one person (hard to believe), the 2025 high-school romance stars Khushi Kapoor as 17-year-old Pia Jaisingh, a high-school student who is super rich and popular, while Ibrahim Ali Khan makes his debut as Arjun Mehta, a national swimmer on a 100% scholarship to Pia’s elitist school. For some ridiculous reasons, Pia gets Arjun to be her fake-boyfriend, and when they develop feelings for real, the class differences become a problem.
The rest of the story is as predictable as it can be, with awful dialogues, boring jokes, mediocre songs, and well, let’s just say the film is like ‘Student of the Year 2’ with a few tweaks. Pia is the rich girl with bickering parents who ignore her, while Arjun gets trolled by wealthy students for being ‘poor’, despite having a successful doctor dad and teacher mom. Kuch bhi.
Ibrahim Ali Khan is a handsome young man; he has his charms, is easy on the eyes, and does an “okay” job for a first film (might get better with more experience). But that’s not enough to make a debut film with a stale “fake dating” trope in high school watchable. Khushi Kapoor is marginally livelier than her own debut performance in 2023 film The Archies, which isn’t saying much since she was completely forgettable in it, and is instead gratingly annoying in Nadaaniya. And before you think I have a problem with star kids – I quite liked The Archies and gave it two more stars than this malarkey.
One of the biggest mistakes made by Nadaaniyan‘s makers is letting Khushi Kapoor serve as the film’s narrator. Her voice isn’t bad, but it’s not “radio presenter” material either. Ibrahim Ali Khan has a better baritone voice and would have undoubtedly been easier on the ears. Besides, isn’t the hardworking scholarship student’s POV better than Daddy’s princess anyway? Also, for some weird reason, their voices seemed dubbed, or maybe they speak Hindi so rarely IRL that the language sounded unnatural on their mouth. So, the only bits that are watchable in the film are some musical montages where the lead pair take photos, posing for their fake dating life on social media. They definitely look cute, but so do a million other couples on instagram who aren’t getting movie deals for a reason.
Nadaaniyan is two hours long, so I downloaded it to watch on a two-and-a-half-hour flight. I ended up pausing the film at least three times. The first pause was to contemplate whether I should just take a nap instead because the film was cringe, cringe, and more cringe. But since I couldn’t sleep, the next two pauses were for my brain to take a break and cry a little. I finally gave up with fifteen minutes left. But then hit rewind to feel fail while I wrote a review, and the climax was cringe-y and predictable too.
Rating: 1 star on 5. Watch something else on Netflix.
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