Toh, Ti Ani Fuji Review | A Radiantly Choreographed Dance Between Codependency And Incompatibility

Toh, Ti Ani Fuji (2026) roughly translated from Marathi to “Him, Her And Fuji”, is a balancing act of the many facets within a torrid relationship. The title itself makes one wonder if the dormant volcano simply signifies a breathtaking Japanese tourist destination or further represents the heaping pile of issues between them. It’s a little bit of both and more, carrying itself in dualities of charm and despair. Directed by Mohit Takalkar, written by Takalkar as well alongside Irawati Karnik and produced by Shiladitya Bora (Platoon One Films), it features a young couple “Toh” (Lalit Prabhakar) and “Ti” (Mrinmayee Godbole) in Pune. Relationships are often described as mirrors, reflecting your insecurities, fears, hopes and dreams—cracking open both your best and worst in front of someone you love. This film, though, puts more emphasis on the latter. The three questions it ultimately asks are: How do you balance selfhood while learning to think as two in a relationship? Can you face your worst parts and still be loved? What if some things just can’t be fixed?

Don’t be fooled by the cover or the visuals from the trailer—it may glow like a neon-drenched Japanese romance, but this isn’t a love story you can coast through. Beneath the striking backdrop, their enmeshed past and the fallout of their choices unravel into something far messier—part heartbreak, part wonder threaded all the way through with quiet despair.  For the sake of our sanity, since the film never once grants them the courtesy of names, let’s call them Mrinmayee and Lalit. From the very first frame, they are deceptively presented to us in the image of star-crossed lovers drifting away into a foreign country, sighting one another after seven years, all by the tricks of fate. 

The fun and frolic carry you through giggly walks down Japanese streets at night, one round of soju blurring into the next. Everything feels easy, cinematic and almost scripted—until it doesn’t. To complicate things further, Mrinmayee now has a seven-year-old son, Karthikeya (Kabir Deven), who pops in with commentary that is equal parts pesky and playful. We start out rooting for these sweet ex-lovers and their insane chemistry, but eventually, are left wondering if they should ever even hear each other’s name again.

The film is also edited by Takalkar, cutting back and forth between the past and present, showing us what’s changed or what’s remained the same between these two characters. What follows feels like a heady blend of Three Of Us (2022), Past Lives (2023) and Marriage Story (2019)—yet the film carves out a space that is distinctly its own.

Mrinmayee is fiercely, almost stubbornly independent: a language translator who has turned doing everything alone into both a skill and a shield. Lalit, meanwhile, is the classic rich-kid paradox: charming, aimless and comfortably adrift, nudged by well-meaning parents to build a life of his own, while he’s still very much in his Wake Up Sid (2009) phase. Each one carries a different memory of their shared history—mundane domesticity, work-worn exhaustion, flashes of violence, shouting matches and lovemaking. At its core, this character study is a sharp, absorbing look at incompatibility: two people circling each other with persistence and hope, trying everything, yet never quite managing to make it work.

As Mrinmayee and Lalit try living together, they juggle flat hunts and cost-of-living math between bouts of passion and impromptu paint fights that leave their rented walls as messy as their expectations. The film also slips in a sharp take on gender roles without demonising either of them. Mrinmayee is the breadwinner while Lalit, after a fallout with his father over self-respect, still relies on pocket money from his mother. In this setup, he wrestles with low self-worth and the nagging suspicion that he doesn’t quite deserve his own big idea—a body sculpting studio that lives more vividly in his head than on paper. Meanwhile, she’s out in the real world, keeping the lights on for both of them, stretching every rupee and somehow managing to be everyone’s caregiver.

She appears to love him with a kind of gentle condescension and pity—kindly meant, yet diminishing—while he loves her through the lens of a man he believes he could be, but can never quite become worthy of her. Despite everything that goes wrong between them, what lingers most is the sense of invisibility, of not being seen within the relationship and the painful impossibility of walking away. The film captures this toxic push and pull with striking clarity, the eruptions of anger, the shouting, the throwing of things, followed almost instantly by remorse. It becomes its defining rhythm. What it understands so well is how deeply entangled such dynamics grow, especially when volatility and vulnerability are both pushed to their extremes. 

In a haunting scene involving gloriously spilled pasta on the floor, Mrinmayee and Lalit sit around it, as if forensically examining the mess. Mrinmayee breaks down over unpaid bills, her mother’s health and her low-paying job and Lalit is unable to reassure her with any semblance of stability. It is within scenes like this that cinematographer Rahul Chauhan is able to dismantle the “non-fiction” beneath the fiction, completely baring the vulnerabilities of this couple. The intimate framing and anxious nature of camerawork especially works in the film’s favour. John Donica’s cinematography within the Japan sections compliments their underlying history. It all seems jolly and well but there’s a trembling one can’t ignore, which could suddenly rupture, like the dormant Mount Fuji. Near the end of the film, just as Mrinmayee and Lalit finally admit how unseen they’ve felt, each lost in their own mess, a mild earthquake quite literally shakes their house.

Marathi actors Godbole and Prabhakar are spectacular in their respective roles, embodying the twists and turns between desires and reality, hope and devastation. What works beautifully in Toh, Ti Ani Fuji’s favour is its refusal to judge or nudge you into picking sides. When lovers fail to find their way back to each other, they like to imagine a meeting point somewhere mythical, distant and untouched by what went wrong. For these two, the odds never quite stood a chance and Japan becomes that “other place,” under the misty abode of Mount Fuji. Whether they can reconcile is left for the audience to untangle.

The film’s non-linear screenplay visually blurs past and present into a deliberate haze, leaving us just as disoriented about the timeline as they are about their relationship. Overall, Toh, Ti Ani Fuji is fantastic, carried almost entirely by its phenomenal actors who slip effortlessly between awkward silences, flashes of hatred, simmering passion and a relatable sense of adulthood—sometimes all in the same breath. As Lalit, Mrinmayee and Kartik gaze at Fuji’s misty reflection in the final shot, you can sense a quiet surrender to what can’t be undone. No explanations left—just the soft weight of a shared past, acknowledged at last, and the stubborn, necessary choice to still claim one’s own happiness.