Director:  Shauna Gautam
Cast: Ibrahim Ali Khan, Khushi Kapoor, Mahima Chaudhry, Dia Mirza and Suniel Shetty
Duration : 119 Minutes 
 
What happens when you throw together a script that sounds like it was written during a sleep-deprived night at a high school party, cast a couple of star kids who can’t quite act, and direct it with all the finesse of a toddler playing dress-up? You get Nadaaniyan, a Netflix disaster of a film that takes privilege, eye-roll-worthy clichés, and the most predictable love story imaginable and somehow turns them into an hour-and-a-half-long exercise in self-inflicted torture.
 
Directed by Shauna Gautam, whose debut here is a true testament to the fact that sometimes, dreams should stay dreams, Nadaaniyan is a story of privilege, perfection, and painfully shallow love. The film attempts to pull the classic trope of the rich girl falling for the middle-class boy, but it does so with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
 
Let’s talk about Pia (Khushi Kapoor) and Arjun (Ibrahim Ali Khan), whose character arcs are about as deep as a kiddie pool. Pia, a South Delhi socialite who looks like she spends her days at expensive cafés instead of school, ropes Arjun, an overachieving middle-class boy from Noida, into pretending to be her boyfriend. It’s meant to be a “transactional” arrangement, which, spoiler alert, ends in a shocking (not) plot twist of them falling in love. Wow. How original.
 
The film feels like a low-budget version of Student of the Year, minus any of the fun or charm. The characters live in a bubble where problems are solved with shopping sprees and the occasional debate club trophy. Oh, and let’s not forget the cringe-worthy moments where Pia’s mom (Mahima Chaudhry) desperately wants a son, a plotline that feels as regressive as your great-grandmother's tea towels. The film seems to be stuck in the 90s, as if it’s trying to make these outdated tropes “relatable” for today’s audience—but guess what? They’re not.
 
And then, there’s the issue of the performances. Khushi Kapoor delivers her lines with the emotional depth of a wet napkin. Every expression feels like she’s one Botox session away from being completely immobile. She’s like the living embodiment of an influencer who doesn’t know how to act, but thought, “Hey, I’ll get by because my last name is Kapoor.” Ibrahim Ali Khan tries his best, but it’s clear that he’s in over his head. The kid has the looks and the charm, but it’s hard to shine when you’re drowning in a mess of poor direction and a story that couldn’t hold water.
 
And what about Suniel Shetty, you ask? He’s... um, there. His character is supposed to be the morally ambiguous father figure, but instead, he just serves as a reminder that even legends can’t save a sinking ship. Dia Mirza and Mahima Chaudhry are underutilized to the point where their performances feel like they were filmed during a lunch break and hastily edited in later.
 
The most frustrating part about Nadaaniyan is that it doesn’t seem to know what it’s trying to be. A rom-com? A drama? A coming-of-age story? It’s all of those things, but none of them done well. The script is lazy, the plot is painfully predictable, and the entire affair reeks of an attempt to create something "relatable" without understanding what real teenagers deal with today. Gone are the days of looking up to characters who do nothing but prance around in overpriced clothes. Today’s youth are way too savvy and cynical for this kind of mindless fluff.
 
To launch Ibrahim Ali Khan in this mess was a risky choice. He could’ve been a star under the right guidance, but this debut seems more like a bad dream than a promising beginning. Maybe it’s just a question of timing—this film feels like it belongs in the early 2000s, when we were all too busy swooning over "perfect" high school love stories and dreaming of fairy-tale endings. Today, we want substance, we want depth, and we want characters we can relate to. Nadaaniyan offers none of that.
 
In conclusion, Nadaaniyan is a colossal failure of a film that’s as shallow as the swimming pool of privilege it tries to sell us. It’s predictable, dull, and embarrassing, with no real effort put into making it anything more than a glossy cover-up of an idea that should’ve been scrapped from the start. This is a movie that somehow manages to be both boring and infuriating, and I’m still trying to figure out how Netflix even greenlit it.
 
Skip this one—unless you want to punish yourself.