Review: Radhe Shyam

I want to know if the ideas left the room when this movie started filming. There are so many moments where you have to either accept that the plot doesn’t exist or just chalk it up to the characters not being fully there in the head. This movie leaves you with so many questions, but don’t worry, because none of them will get answered.
 

PLOT - 3

Radhe Shyam is a period romance drama about Vikram Aditya, the single best palmist to ever live, and Prerna, a doctor who rarely spends a day working. The two happen to meet “against fate” at a train station, and the movie is doomed from that point on. The main characters have very little chemistry. There are very few, if any, moments where their relationship feels real.

The plot, similarly, doesn’t feel real. There are really only three big plot points in this movie. The first is when Aditya reads Prerna’s future, giving her hope that she’ll live for a long time. This is when you find out that Prerna is actually a terminally ill cancer patient. This was dropped so suddenly, as prior to this moment, there was nothing to indicate that Prerna was terminally ill. This is also fully halfway into this two-hour movie.

The second is when Prerna reads Aditya’s journal, which contains his entire future with pictures and she realizes he knew everything that would ever happen in his life. Cue drama because for some reason only one of the two of them can live. Why? Call it whatever you want: fate, destiny, contrived nonsense so the movie can have contrived tension.

The third is the big climax scene where it all just works out (ignore the number of times Aditya should have died). Something I didn’t realize also came with being a palmist and knowing the future was the ability to defy the laws of physics. This man runs up a fully vertical, soaking wet ship deck; doesn’t get squashed to death when a heavy crate falls on him and pins him down; and lives despite falling into the ocean, smashing his head on another heavy crate and presumably drowning in the ocean. Mind you, he was supposed to die in this shipwreck but he doesn’t so that everything can all work out for the happily ever after. There is no explanation. He just doesn’t die.

But it’s okay! Because the two main characters meet up again and are still in love! Everything works out and they get married in a credit photo. Wow, so beautiful.


CHARACTERS - 3

Vikram Aditya is a renowned palmist who has complete faith in his readings and has never been wrong. As a result of this and the fact that he has no love line, he believes he is never destined to be in a relationship, a belief I’m convinced the movie forgets 90% of the time. The movie wants us to believe he is a flirty playboy of a man when in reality he just doesn’t want to put a real label on his relationships even though they do all the things that dating couples do. He’d rather use the phrase “flirtation-ship”. (Okay, bud.)

Doctor Prerna is a confused woman who somehow keeps a job at a hospital despite never treating a real patient. She originally doesn’t want to get involved with Aditya only to be tricked into a relationship and then she… just goes along with it, no questions asked. For unexplained reasons, in the first scene she’s in, Prerna ties a scarf around her waist, throws the other end to some random men, and then hangs out an open train door. Yes, the train is moving. No, we have no idea why she does this.

I think these characters had a lot of potential and their romance could have been interesting, but the movie didn’t really make the relationship feel real. For all two hours of this movie, there wasn’t nearly enough time spent actually developing their characters, both individually and together. The movie seemed to cut away any time there were little scenes that could have built up their relationship, leaving it hanging on huge climactic scenes without any payoff.

There are some side characters, but they don’t really matter and don’t add anything to the story. There is one character that makes no sense in the movie, and it’s a random ship captain with nosophobia. He’s the only patient that actually receives treatment but there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s just kind of there.


ENJOYMENT - 4

This movie is a fine watch. The music is fine. The plot and characters are bad, but not so bad that it’s impossible to watch. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it could be much worse. That said, some scenes added nothing to the plot, had no business being in the movie, or were just weird or confusing. As follows:

In order for Aditya to properly read someone’s future, he has to take out a magnifying glass to look at their palm, and then rub his thumb between his eyebrows for multiple seconds. It looks absolutely ridiculous.

Aditya breaks up with his first girlfriend because she tells him that she loves him and, because he doesn’t believe in love, he stops his car, gets out, and walks away. Yes, he leaves the keys in the car, so congrats to her, she has a new car!

Aditya gets hit by a bus and just walks to a hospital, somehow. I don’t know how he made it all that way after getting hit by a huge bus while standing on a skateboard. He wasn’t even in a car. He should be dead. (This is a common theme in this movie…)

While in the hospital, Aditya “practices dying”, which is code for “acts like a 2 year old, except he’s a grown man”. He gets yelled at for making light of dying while in a hospital, which is a valid point. But it’s okay, because he ropes in the only person at the hospital who isn’t sick and they… act out a scene. This was just a very bizarre scene.

After telling Prerna that he’s leaving and will never see her again, Aditya comes back to tell Prerna something important: He got that one pin she stared at for two seconds. Yes, it was a cheap pin. But it’s actually such a good gift because the last one was bought by a random person, so, off screen, he found that person, followed them to a different country, bought another identical pin only for the person to eventually give them the original pin, and then lied to his mother about the pin. So that makes this pin so much more valuable.


FINAL THOUGHTS

Not a good movie, but it’s not terrible. Lots of scenes to laugh at, and lots of scenes to be confused about.

I really wanted Aditya to scratch his hand, thus giving him a love line, but unfortunately not.

Overall rating - 3.25