Tere Ishk Mein

Genre: Romance | Year: 2025 | Duration: 167 mins | Director: Anand L Rai |  Medium: Theatre (PVR Cinemas) | Trailer: HERE | Language: Hindi | Cast: Dhanush, Kriti Sanon, and others | My rating: 4/5

Favourite Dialogue: “Prem mein mrityu hai, mukti nahin”

I have a fascination with morbid romance, where passion is fierce and consuming, love and ruin walk hand in hand, and loss feels almost sacred. After a long time, I totally enjoyed a Bollywood film, Tere Ishk Mein, for its feverish, fractured, and fearless ode to obsessive love and loss. Anand Rai, as Director, and Dhanush and Kriti Sanon as actors have so beautifully portrayed the volatile landscape of love, messy and irrational, dark and bruised. It is a film that is less about romance and far more curious about what happens when love mutates, dissolves boundaries, and begins to reshape identity itself.

The film centres around Raghu (Dhanush), a young man navigating the emotional ruins of unrequited affection. His world is small, ordinary, burning with relentless restlessness, textured with the familiar lanes of Rai’s cinematic universe. When he falls in love with Mukti (Kriti Sanon), it is with the conviction of a man who sees devotion as delusional destiny. Dhanush’s performance is a masterclass. His portrayal of longing, with shoulders slightly slumped, eyes rimmed with unspoken ache, voice cracking in the in-between spaces of sentences, is brilliant. He brings a fragile humanity that compels empathy even when the character’s choices spiral into moral greyness. There are moments when Raghu’s yearning feels suffocating, and moments when it feels heroic. In several scenes, especially those dealing with solitude and heartbreak, the camera lingers on his face with cruel intimacy. He allows vulnerability to show across the frame, leaving behind emotional aftershocks.

The film’s leading lady, Mukti (Kriti Sanon), is a girl caught between affection, caution, and the burden of societal expectations. She is real, flawed, and aware of her own contradictions. Her emotional arc of moving from curiosity to confusion to a painful clarity is one of the more grounded aspects of the film. What stands out is that Mukti is not a passive recipient of Raghu’s affection. She pushes back, speaks for herself, asserts her boundaries, and refuses to become a prop for his emotional turbulence. In many ways, her character reminded me that intensity does not equal righteousness.

Rai’s filmmaking has always been rooted in the everyday—narrow streets, chaotic homes, lived-in locations where life unfolds in all its contradictions. In Tere Ishk Mein, he retains this aesthetic but adds a layer of psychological depth. His director truly excels in designing silences. Some of the best moments in the film are those where nothing is said: an unfinished sentence, a doorway half-shut, a glance held for one second too long. These are the moments when the film transcends melodrama and ventures into introspection.

What distinguishes this film from typical love stories is its willingness to confront the darker territories of attachment. The film does not glorify suffering, nor does it portray persistence as virtue. Instead, it presents a sobering reality that love can be transformative, but it can also be corrosive if it becomes entitlement.The climax, which is raw, unsettling and necessary, is where the film truly earns its place. It is neither triumphant nor tragic in a conventional sense. Rather, it is painfully truthful. It is a rare mainstream film that lets discomfort linger. A must-watch if you enjoy a turbulent exploration of love.