‘Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan’ Movie Review: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

It’s been years since I’ve laughed so much in a cinema hall. I needed it. Movies are truly the best medicine. There’s only one problem, though. Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan is not a comedy. It’s not supposed to be funny. If anything, it’s the opposite of a comedy — a dead-serious romantic drama that takes an old proverb too far. In an age where most Bollywood films use self-awareness as a front for mediocrity, it’s kind of disarming to watch a bad film that doesn’t know it’s bad. I almost admire it. We often complain that nobody makes timeless Hindi love stories anymore. Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan is why. It’s a high-risk genre: the line between being lyrical and being incapable of touching grass is wafer-thin. One person’s Dreamy is another’s Delusional. But naming the movie after a song from a Sanjay Leela Bhansali classic can’t be a prayer.

Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan (writing the title more helps me hum the song) is adapted from a popular Ruskin Bond short story called The Eyes Have It. The story is poignant for how simple it is: a visually impaired narrator on a Himalayan train journey starts talking to a young woman, unaware that she too is visually impaired. Both try to hide their condition and become unwitting storytellers. But the movie translates and interprets this premise as if it’s the last person in a game of Chinese whispers. Blindness in an aesthetic in Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan. Jahaan (Vikrant Massey) is the narrator on the train that’s passing by scenery perpetually stuck in magic hour. He’s a musician who seeks refuge in words so hard that he says things like “madness is a language” and “I don’t feel like sharing the night with the morning” and “one doesn’t need eyes to see” and “wind is nothing but air with agency” (I made this one up — or did I?).

Enter Saba (Shanaya Kapoor), the young woman in this story — except here, she’s an acclaimed theatre performer who’s decided to go blindfolded for 4 days to prepare for a Bollywood screen test. So you see, she’s pretending to be blind for the sake of her craft. And he’s pretending to not be blind because she’s pretending to be blind. It’s like watching Andhadhun (2018) walk into a bar after a bad breakup and do karaoke with the villainous Mr. Jindal (Naseeruddin Shah) from Mohra (1994). Inspired by Saba’s method-acting grit (“imagine a lifetime of darkness,” she says), I tried shutting my eyes during the film in an effort to method-review it. Needless to mention, this did not work.

A still from 'Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan'

Blindness soon becomes a crutch for this strangely creepy couple. Saba has no sense of safety, self-preservation or intuition. She keeps her blindfold on despite sharing the train compartment with this male stranger. At Dehradun station, she keeps it on and requests Jahaan to help her locate her Mussoorie hotel. At the sold-out hotel, she keeps it on and asks Jahaan if she can stay with him at his friend’s villa (where he plans to write in peace) instead. At the villa, she keeps it on and asks if she can share a bed with him because she’s scared of the darkness. If I were Saba, I’d be in prison. If I were Jahaan, I’d be worried for my life because Saba is essentially a stalker who’s using her blindfold to feign dependance and zero-boundary behavior — or at least that’s what it looks like. But I am not Jahaan. Jahaan is Jahaan, so he doesn’t mind her.

It’s hard to get past this toxic conceit of Saba and her blindfold. Jahaan’s lies (like him not admitting that he’s blind) are as harmless as logic in comparison. The gimmick of casting a first-time actress from a film family as an actress who is desperate to land a Bollywood debut stops being clever in a hurry. At one point, Jahaan yells at Saba for not smelling a gas leak after cooking. He later apologises, explaining that his fear of fire stems from his parents’ deaths in an accident. Does he really need a sad backstory to scold her for almost killing them both? How is their first kiss preceded by the act of him mistakenly losing his pants on a ladder and falling on her half-naked? Is blindness now their kink? Is their roleplay game called 50 Shades of Bae? Does nobody see how absurd and insensitive this is? Never mind.

The interval point is Fanaa-coded enough for the second half to unfold in an entirely different country. To stay engaged with the film, I tried to guess which country this is (“3 years later, somewhere in Europe” wasn’t helpful). It took me a while to notice a hotel name and google-search it to reach the end of my investigative ordeal: Azerbaijan. Relatively speaking, this half is both better and worse, if only for an absolutely bonkers sequence where the ingestion of a date-rape drug — not an acid or weed trip — becomes a catalyst for the couple to confront one another and hallucinate their real feelings at each other. What’s more, this is supposed to be a poetic montage. When Jahaan later narrates this story to his aunt (why do older NRI relatives in movies own a little cafe?), the scene begins with his final line: “...and she got sober and left”. You have to see it to believe it — unless you’re one of the protagonists. There’s also a third wheel, Saba’s boyfriend Abhinav (Zain Khan Durrani), who helps us arrive at the most awkward pause when he tries to make Jahaan jealous by getting touchy-feely with Saba in front of him. Who’s going to tell him?

A still from 'Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan'

At some point, it looks as if Saba forgets that she’s not pretending to be blind anymore. It’s hard to tell. It can be confusing. The film is also full of contradictions. If “the blind deserve dignity and not pity” is Jahan’s worthy motto (he refuses to be called ‘specially abled’ by making an inaccurate comparison: “would you call a poor person ‘specially rich’”?), it never makes sense that the conflict revolves around him wondering how shortchanged she might feel on learning the truth. Like any chivalrous Hindi movie hero, he makes the decision for her — because what’s a modern love story without a man with a martyr complex? Normalising a disability is only a concept in this film, but romanticising it becomes its love language.

Massey is too good an actor to play a candy-floss hero in 2025. He’s been so effective as edgy contemporary lovers with glints in their eyes that one keeps expecting Jahaan to do something twisted — like killing a character or slicing his own hand off. When he doesn’t, one then expects Saba to do the unthinkable: lose her eyesight to be his soulmate. But alas. At the end of the misguided and go-for-broke film, I convinced myself that perhaps blindness is an old-school metaphor for a couple that fell for each other in an online chatroom without physically seeing each other (their webcams are ‘broken’). If that’s the hill I’m going to die on, it implies that Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan could have been an email. With a musical greeting card attached to it.