Tere Ishk Mein

Aanand L Rai’s Tere Ishk Mein charts the violent fallout that erupts when a man refuses to accept rejection or the limits of his own entitlement. It is a tale of how possessiveness curdles into ruin, consuming not only the self but everyone drawn into its orbit.

Grounded after a serious lapse in protocol, Air Force officer Shankar (Dhanush) is placed under the scrutiny of Mukti (Kriti Sanon), a psychologist, whose return dredges up the emotional wreckage they once left unresolved. The narrative folds between the present and their university days in Delhi, where Mukti, then a psychology student struggling to justify her PhD proposal on anger and volatility, was pushed by her professors to produce a compelling case study. She chose Shankar, the notorious campus strongman, as her subject. What follows is a slow, combustible entanglement in which Shankar confuses her academic detachment for genuine affection. As a result, it sets off a chain of consequences that neither could have anticipated…

In Hindi cinema, love stories shaped by class disparity and mismatched expectations have long been a favourite theme, and over the years the genre has evolved in telling ways. Screenwriters Himanshu Sharma and Neeraj Yadav draw on this tradition to craft a narrative about two people whose bond begins in college. With time, that early connection curdles into resentment and hostility that can only grow out of an intense, unguarded affection. When Shankar and Mukti first cross paths as students, he is volatile and unmoored, while she is a committed psychology scholar looking for a subject for her doctoral research on anger and impulse. Yet, what starts as a clinical investigation for Mukti soon lays bare the gulf between their worlds. When Shankar falls for Mukti and reacts violently after she fails to return his affection, she attempts to understand his turmoil. But, as fate would have it, empathy is not a consolation Shankar is willing to accept. This tension is one of the film’s sharper insights, adding a knotty emotional edge to the narrative. The oscillation between love and bitterness, tenderness and distance, acceptance and pride is what cements their story. Even their names carry symbolic weight. Shankar, echoing the mythic Shiva, swallows rejection like poison throughout the film. While Mukti, whose name signifies liberation, cannot offer him the salvation he seeks.

But good intentions and a steady tonal throughline are just the bare minimum of a well-structured screenplay. Tere Ishk Mein gravely falters as it attempts to go beyond the basics. The film asks us to extend sympathy to a man whose obstinacy and emotional toxicity stem not from complexity but from an unwillingness to evolve. Worse, it suggests that Shankar’s destructiveness is potent enough to derail Mukti, pushing her into alcoholism through cycles of guilt and manipulation. As in Rai’s Atrangi Re (2021), psychological distress becomes a narrative prop, flattened, trivialised, and used to justify questionable behaviour. Mukti’s PhD journey, too, is portrayed with a convenience. Even the post-interval montage, in which Shankar decides to prepare for the UPSC, an awkward nod to 12th Fail, feels like another tonal misstep in a film that cannot decide how seriously it wants us to take its characters’ inner turmoil.

Rai attempts to mount this love story on an epic scale by giving Shankar a background in the Indian Air Force. Yet even this ambition feels thinly justified. Shankar chooses to become a pilot simply because it was his father’s abandoned dream before an accident. Earlier, we saw him clear the UPSC prelims on his third attempt. The result is a character shaped less by conviction or circumstance and more by a director who wants him to excel at anything the plot demands. This ‘superhuman by convenience’ approach weighs heavily on a film that leans on spectacle instead of grounding its characters in consistent motivations or credible situations. It only ends up slipping into the familiar masala tropes Hindi cinema still struggles to shake off.

The performances are both a blessing and a burden for the film. They keep the narrative watchable, yet even their collective effort cannot rescue it from its structural weaknesses. Dhanush brings a raw, combustible energy as a man convinced he is destined for a love he is repeatedly denied. Kriti Sanon lends sincerity her role, capturing the conflict of someone unsure whether she has wronged a man she once studied. Prakash Raj is a welcome presence as Shankar’s father and inhabits the role with ease. The supporting cast – Priyanshu Painyuli, Tota Roy Chowdhury, Paramvir Singh Cheema, and a somewhat inexplicably placed Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub – deliver competent performances within the confines of their underwritten roles.

Tushar Kanti Ray’s cinematography often does more heavy-lifting than the screenplay itself. His images capture the volatility and vulnerability of the characters with clarity and shifting emotional currents. Editors Hemal Kothari and Prakash Chandra Sahoo maintain a steady pace, keeping the narrative flow going. Resul Pookutty’s layered sound design adds depth, giving the film an aural texture that complements its moodier stretches. AR Rahman’s songs and background score inject much-needed emotional weight, at times offering more coherence than the narrative they are meant to support.

In the end, Tere Ishk Mein is a film undone by its own narrative waywardness, its reliance on contrivances and uneasy handling of psychological complexity keeping it from landing with the force it seeks.

Hindi, Drama, Color