‘Saiyaara’ shows the Bollywood audience is famished for competent manipulation

Before Sandeep Reddy Vanga, there was Mohit Suri. Before Reddy Vanga assaulted us with his skewed theories on gender—fronted by a protagonist fuelled by his need for verbal, emotional and physical violence, hyper-competence and unusual libido—there was Mohit Suri’s brash, angry, hurting male lead, pining for his loved one, thanks to songs afforded to him by the Bhatts. Most of Suri’s films have followed the outline of Beauty & The Beast: very flat two-dimensional characters of the fair, doe-eyed, reserved girl pitted against a volatile, immature and scruffy man-child (something Sandeep Reddy Vanga has taken forward in his two feature films). The through lines of these films are about reforming the male protagonist because of his sincere, selfless love for the leading lady—something which had some novelty in the 2000s, but has gotten progressively outdated in the last two decades. In 2025, Saiyaara is a ‘blog’ version of a film—one that impresses its viewers by being relatable, easy to consume and having basic coherence.

So, what explains the success of Suri’s film? In the current circumstances, where most films are touted to fail, the success of Suri’s film is surprising and should be given credit where it’s due. But there isn’t much to decode about it, once you’ve watched the film. It’s yet another ‘doomed’ love story—something Suri has tackled earlier in Aashiqui 2 (2013), Awaarapan (2007) and Ek Villain (2014). He tried to push the boundaries of his mopey love stories in his last two enterprises, Malang (2020) and Ek Villain Returns (2022), where he tried to dial up both the violence and the PG-13 sex. After both the films failed, he went back to what works for him—the gifted, mercurial musician will be transformed by the girl’s monk-like demeanour, who will ‘cure’ his cynicism.

It’s not nothing, of course. Love stories can be reinvented; and there could be something disarming about watching two newcomers in a sincere, selfless romance that conquers all. But Saiyaara is not that film. It pretends to be that film long enough to convince itself that it is. But it’s a significantly more cynical version of that sincere, selfless love story. This is evident in the way Suri gets his male lead, Ahaan Panday—Chunky Pandey’s nephew—to go on a nepotism tirade in his first scene of the film. The film’s female lead Vaani (Aneet Padda) remains a poetry-laden damsel, who maintains a cute diary to remember everything. Her forgetfulness is obviously a precursor for Alzheimer's—something even an elementary school kid will be able to predict, so unsubtle is the foreshadowing.

Suri’s film has decent music—it’s not particularly great music, but the kind of weepy tunes that T-Series has cornered for Bhushan Kumar’s YouTube-fuelled empire. Saiyaara is the equivalent of the manufactured viral phenomenon, where it’s being talked about in our digital sphere so incessantly that one might become curious. It’s tapping into our ‘Fear of missing out’ (FOMO)— also a phenomenon that has grown exponentially in the last decade or so.

However, Saiyaara is not a step forward for the Bollywood love story. It’s old wine, in a bottle that has Virat Kohli’s tattoos all over it, to showcase how ‘new-age’ it is. There’s no coyness in showing the lovers kiss, for which the filmmakers might be patting themselves on the back as, again, being ‘modern’. But the film is still chained in the archaic values, skewed gender dynamics of Suri’s films from two decades ago. The moral being: true love overcomes all, which begins to sound like a way to justify this film’s wild contrivances (especially towards the end, when someone spots the missing heroine).

The Bollywood audience showing up in large numbers has never been a measure of ‘good’ films, as the blockbusters of the last few years have shown (Chhaava, Animal, Gadar 2, The Kerala Story, The Kashmir Files,). They’re seeking catharsis inside a movie theatre—whether it’s redirecting their rage towards a religious minority, finding people to blame from five centuries ago, or to nurse their heartbreaks with a healthy portion of hummable tunes. The audience wants to be manipulated—and Saiyaara appears to have done the job.