In this episode, we dive into Nadaaniyan (2025) — a Netflix original teen rom-com so aggressively retro it feels like it was shot on a Motorola Razr. The whole movie plays like it’s trying to cosplay as early-2000s Bollywood but ends up somewhere between Main Hoon Na and A Cinderella Story — minus the charisma.

We all had a hard time making sense of why this movie exists in 2025. Nicky said it best: “watching it was like eating wet cardboard.” There’s a glossy sheen to everything — colorful dance sequences, fancy international schools, drone shots galore — but no soul underneath. The plot is a checklist of every teen rom-com trope: nerdy boy meets rich girl, makeover montage, second-act misunderstanding, etc. By the end, we felt like we’d aged five years — but not in a good coming-of-age kind of way.

Khilli pointed out that the director probably grew up idolizing early Karan Johar films, and it shows. It’s all surface-level emotion with none of the depth. There’s a character who literally holds a boombox outside a window, and we had to pause just to scream. Even the actors seem confused, as if they’ve been dropped into a different decade and told to improv their way out.

I (Adam) went full unhinged and declared that “Mao was right — cultural revolutions are necessary,” because watching nepo babies cosplay as normal people broke something in me. Meanwhile, Winnie tried to give the film a chance but admitted it lost her by the second act: “There was a scene with a hallway slow-motion walk, and I just started thinking about laundry I had to do. It was that bad.”

We also talked about Netflix India’s tendency to churn out high-budget content with zero bite. There was agreement across the board that this was possibly our least favorite film covered on the podcast so far — which made for a weirdly fun episode.