Shaandaar -2015- May 2026

Watch the music video for Gulaabo . Then take a nap. You’ll have experienced the best of Shaandaar without the 144-minute wedding hangover.

Aesthetically, Shaandaar is a marvel. Ayananka Bose’s cinematography bathes every frame in a cotton-candy palette—powder blues, blush pinks, mint greens. Poland has never looked more like a Wes Anderson daydream. But the visual perfection becomes oppressive. It’s a wedding album with no guests, a cake with no sugar. The emptiness of the frame mirrors the emptiness of the plot. The film is so obsessed with being shaandaar on the surface that it forgets to build a single scene with genuine stakes. When the climax arrives—a slapdash, low-energy resolution—you feel not joy, but relief.

The film lurches into a bizarre, hyper-stylized satire of rich, dysfunctional families. Pankaj Kapur (Shahid’s real-life father) plays a deadpan, fortune-hunting patriarch. Sanjay Kapoor is a muscle-flexing buffoon. And then there’s the father-daughter boxing match. And the oddly incestuous undertones of the rival family. The screenplay, co-written by Bahl and Chaitally Parmar, mistakes volume for wit, and caricature for comedy. Scenes don’t build; they just… happen. The wedding planning is forgotten. The insomnia is forgotten. The romance becomes a series of music videos strung together by awkward silences. shaandaar -2015-

Then the wedding guests arrive.

Let’s talk about the music, because it’s both the film’s greatest asset and its most damning indictment. The soundtrack— Gulaabo , Shaam Shaandaar , Senti Wali Feeling —is a masterclass in textured, euphoric pop. Amit Trivedi’s production is lush, quirky, and addictive. For weeks before the release, these songs were the soundtrack to a generation’s monsoon. Watch the music video for Gulaabo

It’s the Bollywood equivalent of a wedding where the food is cold, the speeches are endless, and the bride and groom are clearly exhausted. You want to have fun. The decorations insist you are having fun. But deep down, you’re just counting the minutes until you can leave.

In the annals of Bollywood’s ambitious misfires, Shaandaar occupies a unique, almost dreamlike space. Directed by Vikas Bahl on the heels of the universally adored Queen (2013), and reuniting the effervescent Shahid Kapoor and Alia Bhatt after their hit Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania , the film arrived with the weight of a blockbuster wedding band. Its marketing was a blitz of pastel colors, destination wedding glamour, and a thumping, chart-topping soundtrack by Amit Trivedi. It promised shaandaar —magnificent—fun. Aesthetically, Shaandaar is a marvel

What audiences got instead was a cinematic insomnia cure: a film so tonally bewildering, so narratively inert, that it became less a romantic comedy and more a case study in what happens when style cannibalizes substance.