Title: Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan
Director: Santosh Singh
Cast: Vikrant Massey, Shanaya Kapoor, Zain Khan Durrani
Where: In theatres near you
Rating: 3 Stars
There’s a particular charm to stories that begin on a train—two strangers, a chance encounter, a quiet connection. Director Santosh Singh’s Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan leans into this old-school setup with full faith, coaxing us into a world of soft glances, lyrical musings, and the slightly ludicrous conceit of a blind man falling for a woman pretending to be blind.
Inspired by the sepia-toned romance of a bygone era, the film peers longingly into the rear-view mirror of Hindi cinema, hoping to revive its poetic heart. But somewhere between whimsy and wisdom, it stumbles—charming us at first, then slipping into an overwrought recital of emotions, complete with a blindfold gimmick and a curious disregard for narrative logic.
Loosely drawing from Ruskin Bond’s tender short story, ‘The Eyes Have It’, the film begins with a promising premise: a blind musician meets a blindfolded actress on a method-acting experiment in a train compartment bound for Mussoorie. What follows is less a journey of emotional discovery and more a detour through romantic delusion, aesthetic fog, and hallucinatory choices — some poetic, others downright perplexing.
Vikrant Massey, usually the dependable core of modest films, does what he can as Jahaan, the soulful, sightless musician. Debutante Shanaya Kapoor as Saba, an aspiring actress preparing for an audition by simulating blindness, commits to her blindfold with method-acting fervour. Their early interactions are refreshingly restrained, and for a brief moment, the film captures a bygone kind of romantic tension — built on withheld truths, tentative gestures, and the sheer novelty of not gazing into each other’s eyes.
But then the setting shifts from the misty hills of Mussoorie to a vaguely European backdrop —and the mood promptly careens off track with a new emotional baggage and an ill-fated love triangle, featuring Abhinav (played with sincerity by Zain Khan Durrani), Saba’s boyfriend. While Durrani does his best to add gravitas to a mostly thankless role, his character exists solely to heighten Jahaan’s torment, which he does with such physical enthusiasm that one wonders if he got the wrong script and thought this was a thriller.
The second half plunges into melodrama with wild abandon. And through it all, Saba continues to make choices that blur the line between reckless and bewildering. One begins to wonder if the blindfold has become more than a prop — a metaphor not for love, but for the film’s own narrative vision.
The film also fumbles its messaging around disability. While Jahaan protests being labelled “special,” the script insists on wrapping him in poetic pity. His blindness is used not as a dimension of his character but as emotional shorthand — a disservice to both the story and the audience’s intelligence. A genuinely bold take on vulnerability and love is lost beneath layers of overwritten dialogue and scenes.
Overall, this is a well-intentioned film with an identity crisis. It tries to feel something deeply, even if it often feels too much, too loudly, and for too long. It wants to be lyrical, but slips into parody; it wants to be profound, but settles for precious. Still, it has its heart — if not its eyesight — in the right place.
