I walked into the theatre convinced my friend had booked us tickets for Metro… In Dino. You know, full Arijit Singh album, star-studded cast and the good old rom com vibes. But no, turns out I was holding the tickets to Saiyaara, Mohit Suri’s new “tear-jerker”, “soul-stirring” romance. Betrayal comes in many forms, but this one came in the form of a BookMyShow QR code.
I stepped into the theatre assuming that everyone had come to watch it ironically, like me. But no again. There were couples my age, or slightly older than I were, clutching each other’s hands and whispering things that I can only hope were less cringey than they looked. I braced myself for the standard Mohit Suri experience, a few soulful songs, a rain sequence, a breakup, a few tears shed here and there, done. What I didn’t expect was to be surrounded by sobs and sniffles louder than Josh’s mediocre guitar riffs.
The scenes outside my theatre were no different. Instagram was flooded by reels of people bawling their eyes out on the floors of theatres. Some cried over breakups from four years ago, others because their situationship hadn’t replied for an hour. Apparently, Saiyaara had struck a chord with people who live in someone else’s DMs. Edit accounts on Instagram were already dubbing them the successors of “Jordan-Heer” and “Aditya-Aarohi” as if reusing old templates somehow made the film profound. Cinephiles rolled their eyes at the movie for its lack of plot and how “Krish and Vaani could never” which was the only sensible take I saw all week.
Saiyaara didn’t even earn this hysteria. It arrived with zero to none publicity, no glitz, no glamour, no stars worth mentioning and a trailer that narrated pretty much the entire plot. Mediocre at best, forgettable at worst. The collective catharsis became the marketing campaign. What mattered wasn’t the film, but the performance of having watched it. People weren’t just watching Saiyaara, they wore it as a badge of honour, posting stories like it was a flex when it should’ve been treated like a guilty secret. Everyone needed to prove they were the most heartbroken, the most vulnerable, the most “in touch with their feelings”. Crying in public used to be embarrassment but now it’s become “content” because misery is the algorithm’s best friend.
It should’ve been a film that came and went quietly. But no. The audience turned it into a collective therapy session. This wasn’t just people watching a movie, this was people performing grief for the algorithm.
The film won’t be remembered for its story, mostly because there wasn’t one, but for the reels, people sobbed as if Mohit Suri had wronged them personally. If anything, Saiyaara proved that heartbreak may be universal, but taste clearly isn’t.
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