Tu Hai Meri Kiran

There’s this woman in 2026 who finds a flip-top phone which connects her to a man in 2016. Disbelief — is this some kind of bad joke — turns into shock. How is this even possible? On either side of the decade stand the happily-married Kiran (Sonakshi Sinha) and the jobless stalker Samar (Zaheer Iqbal) who fall into a circuitous loop of breaking-and-joining, till there arrives a tipping point. This is the kind of plot which can either fly or collapse, depending on the skill of the writers. I’m here to tell you that this film, which borrows its title from a film whose stalker hero saga became a super-hit in the 90s, never even achieves lift-off.

Obsessive love, with its unsettling mix of desire, delusion, and possessiveness, has long provided fertile ground for cinema. The idea of a man consumed by an all-encompassing fixation on a woman, and the havoc such an obsession wreaks on her life, can make for a compelling psychological thriller. But obsession, however disturbing or intense, cannot by itself sustain a two-hour film. Without a credible storyline, a tightly constructed screenplay and characters who behave in ways that make psychological sense, even the most intriguing premise risks becoming an exercise in narrative excess. Karan Rawal’s Tu Hai Meri Kiran, now in cinemas, borrows its title from the song of the same name in Yash Chopra’s Darr (1993), the blockbuster that turned a deranged stalker’s obsessive pursuit of a woman into one of Hindi cinema’s most memorable explorations of pathological love. Rawal’s film attempts to give this familiar theme an inventive twist by introducing a science-fiction element: a mysterious telephone connection between two people living a decade apart. Unfortunately, what promises to be an absorbing psychological thriller never quite manages to get off the ground.

If Shah Rukh Khan’s Darr taught us anything, it’s that a man who refuses to take no for an answer is a BIG red flag. Tu Hai Meri Kiran takes that obsession, throws in a time-travelling phone and stretches it across a decade. Sounds interesting, right? It is, until the film gets so busy juggling time, love and obsession that it forgets to make sense. Starring Sonakshi Sinha and Zaheer Iqbal, the film connects two strangers from 2016 and 2026 through an old flip phone. Samar (Zaheer) and Kiran (Sonakshi) strike up an unusual connection, and you expect them to solve a mystery, change their destinies or perhaps prevent something terrible from happening. Instead, things take a detour when Samar decides that talking to Kiran isn’t enough. He wants her.. and he wants her at any cost.

The trailer of Tu Hai Meri Kiran suggests a psychological thriller about obsession: a woman pushing back against a man who refuses to let go, but the film turns out to be far more than its trailer implies. In fact, the film’s biggest strength is how much it holds back before revealing what it really has in store for the audience. I went in expecting one kind of thriller, but what unfolded on screen was a genuine surprise. The makers deserve credit for not giving away too much in the trailer. It’s a lesson other filmmakers could take note of. Directed well, shot effectively and edited sharply, the film gets several essentials of a psychological thriller right. The sound design deserves special mention, adding to the tension and keeping you immersed in the unfolding drama. There is also a time-travel element to the story, but I wouldn’t want to reveal more and spoil the experience. It’s best to walk into the cinema knowing as little as possible.