‘Ufff Yeh Siyapaa’ Movie Review: There Are No Words

If not for movies like Ufff Yeh Siyapaa, I’d be in denial about my age. Denial is not an option when I try to pull out my hair only to be met with a receding hairline. Thanks to the constant face-palming, I also realise that my skin has wrinkles. Thanks to the involuntary sighing and eye-rolling, I realise that yoga might be good for my stamina. Thanks to the inability to keep my eyes on the screen, I realise that my mind needs glasses too. And thanks to the resolute awfulness of a 116-minute silent comedy in 2025, I realise that my life is truly too short.

You heard that right. Ufff Yeh Siyapaa (sometimes when I type a title down, I wonder why) is a wordless movie, so it’s somewhat fitting that it leaves us speechless. This also means that A.R. Rahman’s garageband-coded background music becomes the dialogue and the screenplay and the direction, which isn’t stylistically different from how ‘normal’ background scores underline the emotions and intent and message and text and subtext and entire histories of moments in regular Hindi talkies. The wordlessness is a gimmick that goes so wrong for so long that there’s enough time for Chaplin to turn in his grave and send a silent prayer to Barfi for proving that tributes can be done without looking like a parody of a parody of a parody.

Even as a ‘genre’ it doesn’t make sense, because are the characters actually mute, or are they explicitly choosing not to speak, or is the film allergic to human expression, or is it only selective about ambience and sounds, or is it some allegory about how mediocrity knows no language? At some point, you have to wonder if it’s an excuse to stage just another stale slapstick film that has nothing new (or watchable) except for its…incoherent quiet. I’ve always heard that silence is complicity, but silence is straight-up murder here. At some point, there is no point. I should write on the premise before I also run out of words.  

Allegedly, Ufff Yeh Siyapaa is about a common man named Kesari (Sohum Shah) whose life is thrown into utter chaos the second he purchases a ticket to watch Ufff Yeh Siyapaa in a cinema hall. Okay, I’m kidding. Or am I? Either way, his life is thrown into chaos in the following way(s): he flirts with his neighbour (by ending up on a skateboard between her legs — don’t ask), his heartbroken wife (Nushrratt Bharuccha with a prosthetic nose) leaves him, a drug package mistakenly reaches his house, a dead body (Nushrratt Bharuccha without a prosthetic nose) is discovered in his living room, a Dabangg-inspired cop (Omkar Kapoor) is put on the case, another dead body (Ashok Pathak) is discovered in his living room, his wife’s doppelgänger and his neighbour turn out to be crooks, there’s a suitcase of money, there is no end, tomorrow never comes.  

All of this, without dialogue. Like a live-action cartoon who’s had too many old monk quarters on a dry day. Like a comic-book on muscle relaxants. Like a mime artist without artistry. Just sighs, grunts, groans and a whole lot of cheap foley effects. Where are those badly written lines when you need them? Where is the questionable dubbing and clunky sound design? Where’s a voice (I’m not even being metaphorical) when you need one? It doesn’t help that not a single performer — except maybe Omkar Kapoor as the tobacco-chewing Gujarati cop — passes the exam of physical comedy. It’s painful to watch, because you can tell that they don’t know what they’re doing but they’re doing so much of it. Even if the fakeness is deliberately heightened to create some sort of Broadway-musical illusion, why? Just, why? Kesari is also the kind of protagonist who manufactures trust issues in the viewer; every time something dramatic or horrible happens, it’s revealed that Kesari was imagining it all because he fears the worst. Nothing feels real. At some point I started hoping that I was a figment of his imagination too. 

There came a stage where I dared to expect something smart. For 30 unbearable minutes, we see Kesari stuck in what is supposed to suddenly be a horror comedy when he discovers a random corpse in his apartment. This portion is so poorly filmed, edited, scored, choreographed, conceived and directed that it almost looks like a practical joke. It is not. Not too long later, though, we see the same sequence from the corpse’s point of view — and then understand why Kesari was hallucinating so badly (or why the film looked so off). It’s more One Cut of the Dead than Rashomon: seeing the film followed by the chaos of the film-making. But even the corpse’s perspective is poorly filmed, edited, scored, choreographed, conceived and directed. This is repeated in the second half with the next corpse. It’s like being stuck in a torture-rewatch purgatory — the movie-going equivalent of having to die again and again and again to survive. If there’s going to be a sequel, and if some of us do live to see it, I expect the biggest gimmick possible: not only wordless but also imageless. Just a blank screen. And no audience.