Kedarnath movie review: It’s a weepie minus the tears

Kedarnath movie cast: Sushant Singh Rajput, Sara Ali Khan, Nishant Dahiya, Nitish Bharadwaj, Pooja Gor, Alka Amin
Kedarnath movie director: Abhishek Kapoor
Kedarnath movie rating: Two stars

This, today, is a perfect day to have watched an inter-faith love story.

It is the day a mob destroyed a masjid, and changed the face of India, making it the country we live in today – Divided, polarized, simmering.

But is Kedarnath that perfect love story? By rights, the debut film of Sara Ali Khan, in which she plays a Hindu girl in love with a Muslim boy, played by Rajput, should have been just the film.

The names Mukku aka Mandakini and Mansoor have a nice ring to them. And their meet-cute is refreshingly un-drippy. But soon, melodrama overtakes them; the plot reveals its creaky bones, and the treatment becomes a dismaying throwback to the socials of the ‘60s and ‘70s in which the enraged fathers would declaim loudly, the mothers would wring their hands, and the villain of the piece would gather his forces to pulp the poor hero.

Ali Khan starts off a tad awkward, but soon settles in and shows a perky confidence, very reminiscent of her mother, the actor Amrita Singh. Dahiya as the fly in the ointment has impact; as does Gor as Ali Khan’s sister, and Amin as Rajput’s mother. Rajput himself doesn’t really come up with anything new, and Bharadwaj as the angry ‘door-ho-jaao-meri-nazaron-se-baap’ is old, old hat.

And that’s the trouble with Kedarnath. Using the devastating 2013 Uttarakhand floods as a major plot twist should have given the film some depth. But the writing is sketchy, and the tone confused, never quite knowing whether to go quiet and life-like or to swell with wailing violins, especially when the waters start rising, and life-threatening danger starts looming.

In trying to please everyone, the film loses edge, and leads to a tepid cop-out. It’s a weepie minus the tears.