Gehraiyaan Movie Review: Deepika Padukone, Siddhant anchor this Shakun Batra film

Deepika Padukone, Ananya Panday, Siddhant Chaturvedi and Dhairya Karwa-starrer Gehraiyaan braves a storm of complexities it brought upon itself and moves on to calmer waters by the end, says our movie review. Gehraiyaan, also starring Naseeruddin Shah and Rajat Kapoor, is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Moving on and moving away are two very different things. Moving on is a choice - hard, frustrating, and unlike what cinema, pop culture and literature tell you, it isn't beautiful. Moving away is simply surrendering to the helplessness you're feeling at that moment. Shakun Batra's Gehraiyaan, starring Deepika Padukone, Ananya Panday, Siddhant Chaturvedi and Dhairya Karwa, and Naseeruddin Shah and Rajat Kapoor in supporting cast, dives straight into this kashmakash, as it were. After a rather stormy middle, the Amazon Prime Video release does find calmer waters.

Tia (Ananya) and Alisha (Deepika) are cousins. Certain choices made for them when they were too young have led them to grow up as two very different individuals. But each is a reflection of their past - Alisha, especially, of her mother. And that's something Shakun Batra reveals slowly, almost sensuously, just as you're more and more invested in the film. Zain (Siddhant) is Tia's fiance, a promising entrepreneur in the real-estate sector, while Karan (Dhairya), Alisha's boyfriend of six years, is a struggling novelist who's just quit a job in advertising to write his first book. Things unravel, and fast, when they head off on a holiday to Alisha and Tia's beach house in Alibaug, a house they frequented as kids.

Shakun Batra firmly sticks to the metaphor he was trying to go for with the title - gehraiyaan. So, on the surface, Tia and Zain's lives seemed perfect - they were madly in love, living in lavish houses, jetting off to Alibaug from the Mumbai coast on a yacht instead of the humble ferry. In comparison to that, Alisha is just stuck. Floating, but not really reaching the shores. Deep down, Zain and Tia's lives may be vastly different, as the audience is slowly made aware of, but on the surface, it is perfect.

A bit of friendly flirting, a sexual tension you could cut with a knife, some more nudging over the next few days, and Alisha and Zain find a sense of passion taking over and they cannot help but succumb to their most carnal desires. Was Alisha attracted to Zain, or the idea he led on?

Watch the trailer of Gehraiyaan here:

The best part about Gehraiyaan is that it doesn't reveal too much in the trailer, just enough to hook you. Slyly enticing you with the kissing and the lovemaking scenes. For, Alisha and Zain hooking up and essentially cheating on their respective partners isn't the only complexity Gehraiyaan gives you. It is only the tip of the iceberg their lives are about to hit.

Gehraiyaan is a very stylish film, almost too clean for its own good. Shakun clearly was going for a Hollywood vibe in order to make this story about cheating palatable to the larger Indian audience. He was largely successful. The unabashed ripping off of clothes, hungry kisses, flunking-each-other-on-the-bed kind of lovemaking - glimpses of which we saw in the trailer - take up a major part of the film. Was it all necessary? Perhaps in Shakun's mind it was, simply to justify that we're all enslaved by our desires.