Bhool Chuk Maaf

In Bhool Chuk Maaf (2025), debutant director Karan Sharma blends the rom-com formula with a time loop premise, aiming for a commentary on societal expectations. But despite its promising setup, the film finds itself stuck in a repetitive narrative rut, leaving both its protagonist and the audience circling the same emotional ground with diminishing returns and resulting in an inert experience.

Ranjan (Rajkummar Rao) and Titli Mishra (Wamiqa Gabbi) live in Banaras and are in love and want to get married. But, as is often the case in such tales, love alone isn’t enough — there’s always a hitch. Ranjan is unemployed, and Titli’s father, Brijmohan (Zakir Hussain), will only agree to the marriage if Ranjan secures a government job within two months. For Ranjan, it’s a near-impossible task. That’s when Bhagwan Das (Sanjay Mishra), a shady fixer who claims to arrange government jobs for a price, enters the picture. With no other choice, Titli pawns her mother’s gold necklace so that Ranjan can pay the bribe. But just when things seem to be moving forward, Das disappears with the money. Left helpless and hopeless, Ranjan makes a vow to Lord Shiva, praying for a way out of the mess. His wish is granted. But soon he realises that even a miracle comes with a price…

Over the past decade, Hindi cinema has increasingly turned its gaze away from the chaos of the metropolises and towards the quieter charm of India’s smaller towns and cities. It has resulted in a welcome shift, allowing stories steeped in local flavour and emotional specificity. Films like Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015), Bareilly Ki Barfi (2017), and Mimi(2021), among others, have thrived in this space, using modest settings to tell deeply resonant tales. Bhool Chuk Maaf aspires to join their ranks. With its textured backdrop of Varanasi, complete with its winding gullies, the ghats on the Ganga, saffron-clad sadhus, and idiosyncratic middle-class households, the film establishes a world that is both picturesque and ripe for comedy and pathos.

But for all its carefully constructed atmosphere, the film falters where it matters most: narrative engagement. The screenplay meanders, the pacing drags, and by the time the central conflict — Ranjan getting trapped in a seemingly endless time loop on the eve of his wedding — finally kicks in (a full hour in), the momentum has already dissipated. What could have been a clever narrative device becomes an exercise in tedium, repeated to the point of exhaustion. Rather than drawing us into the protagonist’s emotional turmoil, the film ends up testing our patience. One begins to suspect that writers Karan Sharma and Haider Rizvi simply ran out of narrative steam, padding the runtime with scenes that serve little purpose beyond filling the obligatory two-hour mark.

The film is populated by a flurry of secondary characters who, at first glance, suggest the potential for a lively and textured ensemble. And yet, despite their narrative presence, these characters remain frustratingly underdeveloped, as if the script itself had little interest in who they are. Just as the film limps toward its conclusion, a new character is introduced, a Muslim youth who has been a victim of the very corruption the film claims to critique. It’s a last-minute addition that feels less like organic storytelling and more like a hurried attempt at social commentary. The finale, for its part, hinges on a long, overwrought monologue from Das, which attempts to distil the film’s message into a single, tidy moral lesson. One gets the sense that the filmmakers may have written the ending first and reverse-engineered the plot to get there. As for the comedy, which ought to have emerged naturally from character dynamics and sharp dialogue, it lands with all the weight of a damp firecracker.

Rajkummar Rao, who dominates the screen time, brings his trademark blend of charm and comic timing to the role that is enough, at times, to elicit a chuckle or two with his delivery or stir a moment of empathy, particularly in the film’s more emotionally heightened climax. But these flashes are few and far between. The character he’s saddled with feels overly familiar, a reheated version of roles he’s played before, offering little that stretches his considerable talent. Wamiqa Gabbi, as Titli, brings a natural charm to the role, adding some life to a character that often comes close to being cringeworthy, and she almost pulls it off through sheer conviction. As for the supporting cast, including Seema Pahwa, Raghubir Yadav, Sanjay Mishra, and Zakir Hussain, they are reduced to being little more than narrative fillers, dropped in and out of scenes with the mechanical rhythm of a casting checklist. Ishtiyak Khan, as Kishan, gets little more than a token presence, appearing only in scenes that orbit around Rao, as though his character ceases to exist the moment our lead exits the frame.

Sudeep Chatterjee lends some visual gravitas to the film, capturing the spiritual grandeur of Varanasi through sweeping aerial shots, while rendering its labyrinthine alleys and modest interiors with a keen eye for layering and texture. Subrata Chakraborty and Amit Ray’s production design does much of the heavy lifting when it comes to grounding the film in a tactile and lived-in reality. No amount of editorial finesse can mask the script’s fundamental inertia, though Manish Pradhan’s editing does its best to maintain a sense of rhythm and pace. Subash Sahoo’s sound design struggles to assert itself, largely drowned out by Ketan Sodha’s overly insistent background score, which tends to substitute volume for emotion. Of the musical offerings, only Koi Na manages to linger; the rest of Tanishk Bagchi’s compositions slip into forgettable territory.

Bhool Chuk Maaf is a film that is finally caught in its temporal quicksand. What might have been a sharp, heartfelt exploration of repetition and change becomes, ironically, a tedious exercise in both, leading to a narrative dead-end and offering little in the way of development or reward.

Hindi, Comedy, Drama, Colour