Tere Ishk Mein

Himanshu Sharma and Neeraj Yadav's screenplay is engaging at several places, but also gets confusing after a point. Himanshu Sharma and Neeraj Yadav's dialogues are a highlight and add to the drama and humour. Aanand L Rai's direction is engaging. He starts the film at a decisive point and then the narrative goes into a flashback mode. It intrigues viewers as they want to know what went wrong between the characters. Some scenes seem to be executed to appeal to Dhanush’s South fans; it works and doesn’t seem out of place. Where Aanand scores highly is in creating drama. A few scenes stand out for execution and originality like Mukti asking Shankar to become his subject, Mukti asking a scared man to slap Shankar and the madness that erupts in the bar. Mukti arriving at Shankar’s place and the intermission point are also quite gripping.

Credit to writers Himanshu Sharma and Neeraj Yadav for crafting a screenplay that keeps you pinned to your seat in the first half. It is engaging, with Aanand drawing you deep into his world. The story moves well, but as the interval nears, it starts losing its early charge. Suddenly, the narrative shifts to a bet between Shankar and Mukti’s father, and the grip weakens.

Even in 2013, Dhanush’s character’s slitting-his-wrists in his pyaar-ka-paagalpan being papered over by belated calming was a problem. In 2025, so many elements in the film are problematic at so many levels, starting with a ‘hero’ whose uncontrollable temper can’t be in all honesty explained away by his mother-less childhood, with a perfectly supportive father (Prakash Raj) at his back. Dousing PhD scholar Mukti’s (Kriti Sanon) potential boyfriends with petrol, and fire-bombing her IAS father’s (Tota Roy Chowdhury) house isn’t intensity, it’s just toxicity, and what can one say of Mukti’s slipping down the path of alcoholic misery? It’s damaging to the whole idea of a female lead being able to stick to her point of view: refusing to be cowed by a guy who ‘can’t handle rejection’ looked as if it was an initial choice, and then the plot gives up on her.