I had never thought that there would come a film — at least in my lifetime — that could challenge the combined vacuous pointlessness of the Student of the Year franchise. That distinction belongs to Nadaaniyan, a film which, even though we are just in March, stands a good chance of being within the Top 5 section of the worst films list of 2025.
Nadaaniyan, streaming on Netflix, comes from the same folks who, of course, made the Student of the Year franchise. Dharma Productions may have packaged its ‘younger’ productions as the more sleek-sounding Dharmatic, but Nadaaniyan is clearly not the kind of film that is going to take them far. Nor is it the kind of debut that actors Saif Ali Khan and Amrita Singh should have approved for their son Ibrahim Ali Khan.
Nadaaniyan translates to ‘innocence’, but is far from the loss of it. What you, the viewer, clearly lose during the course of this 119-minute ‘film’ — a home video with a very big budget — is time, patience, sanity and grey cells. What you gain is the realisation that the human eye is capable of at least 200 eye rolls per minute. I am sure that Naadaniyaan has safely helped me cross that number, making me eligible for at least one Guinness World Record certificate in my lifetime. The other could, in all probability, be the fact that I lived through it.
Wannabe pretending to be woke, Nadaaniyan operates within the same world that we have seen Johar feed us in many films before, peopled as it is with superficial characters battling superficial problems in their superficial minds. I don’t even have a problem with that, given that cinema also means the suspension of reality. Most of commercial Bollywood cinema is all about that, with Badass Ravi Kumar, that released last month, showing us that crass and crazy can also be fun. Any film that makes one believe that it can be uttered in the same breath as a Himesh Reshammiya film is already unsalvageable.
‘NCR shaming’ could well be the logline of Nadaaniyan. Directed by first-timer Shauna Gautam, the film is set in Delhi, with those from the ‘burbs — in this case, Noida bears the brunt, with a few insults hurled at Ghaziabad and Faridabad — being looked down upon. The film starts with Khushi Kapoor’s Pia Jaisingh saying: ‘Main privilege aur entitlement ki poster princess lagti hoon.’ That made me chuckle, to be honest, because I thought I was in for a self-aware ride that would troll itself as well as the sub-genre that Bollywood, particularly the films churned out by its own makers, have often been accused of making.
As it turns out, one was expecting too much. Nadaaniyan peddles the most ridiculous lines with a straight face, most of which belong to Khushi and Ibrahim. The film starts abruptly and continues to operate in a stop-stutter manner, giving the feel that smallish bits of it were slapped together and stitched on the editing table. Pia is the poor little rich girl whose parents (played by Suniel Shetty and Mahima Chaudhary) are estranged and whose grandfather (Barun Chanda) mocks her for being a girl because only a man can take over the reins of the family-run law firm.
Pia also has the most irritating set of besties. A misunderstanding with them makes her invent the fact that she has a boyfriend. The said candidate is Arjun Mehta (Ibrahim), the serious kid at Falcon High, who, however, becomes the head of the school debate team by flaunting his six-pack abs. Go, figure.
Arjun from ‘Nyodda’, as he is mocked by the so-called cool set, is paid on a weekly basis for his boyfriend duties, which includes Pia using a guidebook to ‘soft launch’ him into the worlds of both real and virtual. The boy — whose parents are played by Jugal Hansraj and Dia Mirza, the duo lending some much-needed dignity to the film — has a vision board in which he eventually wants to develop an app called ‘Quick Kanoon’ and sell it to Google for millions (his words, not ours). But a fake arrangement — as expected in this ‘rom con’ — turns into real pyaar, bringing on a happily ever after. Not for the audience though.
Packed with lines like ‘Dilli ki pollution mein toot tey taare nahin dikhte’, ‘My highlighter is losing its glow’ and my absolute ‘favourite’ of Archana Puran Singh’s reprisal of Mrs Braganza from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai being referred to as ‘Dilli ki Dumbledore’, Nadaaniyaan eventually reaches a point of no return. You know that when Orry, in one scene, turns out to be one of the better ‘actors’ in the film and Meezan Jafri’s cameo makes you wish the film had given him more to do.
Which brings us to Ibrahim the debutant. The Pataudi scion has good looks and a decent screen presence and one only hopes he does a better job (and gets a better deal) going forward. Like Khushi, ‘Ibrahim’s got latent’. But safe to say, dad Saif isn’t going ‘wow’ every time he hears son go ‘owww’ (a running gag in the film) in his debut.
