July 5, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Anurag Basu
Hindi with subtitles
Culture Representation: Taking place in various cities in India, the musical film “Metro … in Dino” features an all-Asian cast of characters representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: Eight adults have various struggles in their love lives.
Culture Audience: “Metro … in Dino” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and stereotypical romance movies.
“Metro … in Dino” is entirely too long (145 minutes) for this uneven romantic musical that is so unimaginative, corny and predictable. The story’s four main couples are tedious when acting out cliché insecurities about infidelity, finances and aging. “Metro … in Dino” is also strangely disjointed because it starts of being a musical (where people sing their conversations in forgettable songs), but the musical concept is abandoned by the last third of the film, which turns into a stale soap opera.
Written and directed by Anurag Basu, “Metro … in Dino” (which means “Metro … Nowadays” in Hindi) takes place in various Indian cities. The movie is a “spiritual sequel” to Basu’s 2007 film “Life in a … Metro,” but there are also obvious inspirations from writer/director Richard Curtis’ 2003 comedy/drama “Love Actually.” “Metro … in Dino” follows eight adults and the various issues they have in their love lives, but the movie has extraneous subplots that just drag out an already boring film.
These are the movie’s eight main characters:
- Parth (played by Aditya Roy Kapur), who is in his 20s, is a fun-loving, commitment-phobic bachelor who works as a travel vlogger.
- Chumki (played by Sara Ali Khan), who is in her 20s, is a bachelorette with a master’s degree in business and works as a human resources manager in a corporate office, but she’s still unsure of what she wants to do as a career.
- Akash (played by Ali Fazal), who is in his 30s, gave up his dream to become a professional musician and took a corporate office job after he got married so that his wife could feel more financially secure.
- Shruti (played by Fatima Sana Shaikh), who is in her 30s, is Akash’s wife whose goal is to start a family with him when they are financially stable.
- Monty (played by Konkona Sen Sharma), who is in his 40s, is cheating on his wife (whom he’s known for 19 years) by having emotional affairs with younger women whom he meets online.
- Kajol (played by Pankaj Tripathi), who is in her 40s, is Monty’s angry wife who finds out about this infidelity and decides to get revenge on him.
- Prival (played by Anupam Kher), a widower who is in his 60s, is looking forward to his college reunion, where he reconnects with a former love interest named Shivani.
- Shivani (played by Neena Gupta), who is in her 60s and is the unhappily married mother of Kajol and Chumki, feels regret that Shivani gave up too much of her independence and dreams when Shivani became a homemaker spouse.
“Metro … in Dino” begins by showing Akash and his band (in real life: Pritam, Papon, Shashwat Singh, Raghav Chaitanya) performing bland pop music on the rooftop of a high-rise building. The movie has interludes that show the band performing in different locations, usually on the top of a building, as if that’s supposed to make the band’s trite music sound better. It doesn’t. These band scenes just look like awkwardly placed music video clips.
Throughout the movie is scene after scene of romantic movie stereotypes that have no flair and are thrown into the jumbled storylines. There are “meet cute” moments that look unrealistic. There are schemes to make a lover jealous. There are people lying about their identities. And there are “aha” moments where certain people finally decide who they want to be with in a committed romance.
Chumki and Parth, who live in Delhi, have their “meet cute” moment when she accidentally goes into his apartment while she’s very drunk because she thinks it’s her apartment. Parth happens to be taking a shower when she enters his apartment. And when he steps out of the shower, Chumki physically attacks him because she thinks he’s an intruder.
Parth and Chumki have an immediate attraction to each other, but she already has a “perfect” boyfriend when she meets Parth. Chumki’s boyfriend is handsome but shallow Anand (played by Kush Jotwani), who works in the same office as Chumki. Anand and Chumki also have the same boss. As already shown in the “Metro … in Dino” trailer, the relationship between Chumki and Anand gets more serious when they become engaged to be married.
Shruti is Parth’s platonic friend. They confide in each other about problems in their love lives. Parth doesn’t want to blatantly pursue Chumki when he knows that she already has a boyfriend, so he enlists Shruti to pretend to be his wife so he can “accidentally” see Shruti again and invite her to dinner on a double date.
Akash grows tired of his corporate job and decides to quit to revive his pursuit of being a professional musician. He decides to move from Bengaluru to Mumbai to find work as a musician and possibly get a record deal. Akash’s relocation happens around the same time that Shruti finds out that she’s pregnant and has stayed behind in Bengaluru. The long-distance separation takes a toll on the marriage. Shruti becomes attracted to a single father named Amay (played by Varun Tewari) while Akash is away.
Kajol likes to pretend to her friends that she has an idyllic life with Monty and their daughter Pihu (played by Ahana Basu), who is 15 years old. Monty openly brags to his friends that he’s cheating on Kajol with younger women whom he meets online. Kajol finds out about this infidelity and pretends to be a younger woman online and uses the alias Maya so that she can catch Monty (who uses the online alias is Wing Commander Raina) in the act of cheating.
Later in the movie, Kajol and Pihu go to Pune to visit Kajol’s mother Shivani. Shivani lives with her husband Sanjeev (played by Saswata Chatterjee), who takes Shivani for granted and who has cheated on Shivani in the past. When Shivani was young, she wanted to be an actress and shared this passion for movies and acting with her college friend Parimal. You can bet that this passion will be re-ignited when Shivani and Parimal see each other again.
Parimal lives platonically in Kolkata with Jhunuk (played by Darshana Banik), who was the fiancée of his now-deceased son. Jhunuk has a new boyfriend named Rohan (played by Pranay Pachauri) who thinks this living arrangement is unusual, to say the least. The movie goes off on a very dull and clumsy tangent about relationship issues between Rohan and Jhunuk.
Another unnecessary subplot that makes “Metro … in Dino” overstuffed is when teenage Pihu explores her sexuality because she’s not sure if she’s heterosexual or a lesbian. She asks Apple’s Siri app for advice. And then, she asks her aunt Chumki for advice. Chumki tells Pihu that she’ll know what her sexuality is when Pihu kisses a guy and a girl.
The characters of Parth, Chumki, Kajol and Monty get the most eventful relationships. Akash, Shruti, Pirval and Shivanti are sidelined for long stretches of the movie and are mostly underdeveloped characters. Halfway through the movie, it would be understandable if “Metro … in Dino” viewers forget that Pirval and Shivanti exist because Pirval and Shivanti aren’t seen or mentioned at all for such a long period of time in the film. The acting performances are mostly mediocre and occasionally good but not strong enough to make the movie consistently interesting.
“Metro … in Dino” lumbers along with storylines that connect all the main characters, but the result of all this intertwining is like a watching a cinematic version of a tangled and flimsy ball of yarn. After a while, the arguments, misunderstandings, and deceptions that happen in these characters’ relationships become annoying, not endearing, because the movie’s scenarios have been seen and done before in much better films. “Metro … in Dino” is supposed to be a depiction of modern romance among adults, but too many of these adults act like they’re teenagers in an outdated and tacky melodrama.
AA Films released “Metro … in Dino” in select U.S. cinemas and in India on July 4, 2025.
