Review: Tortured and never-ending, ‘Tere Iskh Mein’ gives intensity a bad name

The man you were told to stay away from in school, college, adulthood? The man who inked your name on his arm without informing you, who declared that he would die for you without you wanting him to, who stalked you while you were trying to move on? Tere Iskh Mein is about that man.

He’s like the hero of Aanand L Rai’s Raanjhanaa (2013), and he’s played by the same actor, Dhanush. In Raanjhanaa, Kundan laid down his life for his childhood love Zoya even though she didn’t reciprocate his feelings. In Tere Ishk Mein, Shankar turns up at Mukti’s house and throws a liquid on her face.

It isn’t acid – it’s a threat – but it’s a reminder to Mukti (Kriti Sanon) that she is paying the price for ever having met Shankar. For director Rai and writers Himanshu Sharma and Neeraj Yadav, this is an expression of amour fou, mad love. (Mukti even speaks French at one point).

Tere Ishk Mein poses as a complex and even spiritual film about reckless passion. The intensity is capitalised and literally expressed by Dhanush’s unnerving stare. But the film’s simplistic, binary and ultimate crude bent is embodied in a hero who seeks to avenge rejection by threatening to disfigure the woman.

Shankar and Mukti meet in college in Delhi. Mukti is a clinical psychology student with a proposal to permanently end violence. She decides to experiment on Shankar, a rowdy student leader who has terrorised the campus.

The working-class Shankar is incapable of harbouring complex emotions, unlike Mukti, the sophisticated daughter of an IAS officer (Pushparag Roy Choudhury). Shankar is strangely unaware that Delhi is riven by class differences or that a relationship between people at the opposite ends of the economic and intellectual spectrum is complicated, to say the very least.

Mukti enables Shankar’s delusion too. The salt in your sweat is attractive, she says without a hint of irony.

But at least she is honest. Mukti warns Shankar that her attempts to civilise his savage ways is only for research. It’s a transaction. No feelings are involved. We know where this is leading.

Since Tere Ishk Mein buys wholesale into the BS about poor men in situations of unrequited love and dumb women who should know better, Shankar is justified at every point. There are scenes in the film that will comfort every unrelenting stalker, who walks around with petrol bombs and hands itching to strangle the necks of their beloved.

“Murkh aurat!” Shankar tells Mukti in a particularly cringe-worthy scene. “Aurat” and “bitch” are interchangeable here.

Before Raanjhanaa, Dhanush played a host of deranged lovers in Tamil cinema who have zero understanding of consent or the messiness of emotions. In Tere Ishk Mein, the 42-year-old actor saddles up once again to portray a student and then an Indian Air Force pilot on a Quixotic mission in which he somehow turns out to be right all along.

The IAF might have to rethink its training regimen, given that the aggressive and rule-breaking Shankar is the only thing that stands between victory and defeat. The psychology profession too might consider who it hands out licences to, given Mukti’s singular inability to be of use to anybody else, let alone herself.

The enervating experience, which drags on for 169 minutes, inserts the god Shiva into Shankar’s self-imposed agony and even puts its own spin on immaculate conception. Shankar brags that his is the last generation that will express love in this manner. With good reason, perhaps.

AR Rahman’s soundtrack, with lyrics by Irshad Kamil, includes a song that compares the tough UPSC exam to an irritating girl, but also has a few lovely tunes. Although the movie firmly on Dhanush’s side, Kriti Sanon deserves a shout-out for her endurance.

Sanon’s star has been shining brighter ever since Mimi (2021). She is fully committed to Mukti’s yo-yoing arc and is especially heart-rending in the scenes in which Mukti begs Shankar to leave her alone.

Me too, Mukti. Me too.