Tere Ishk Mein Cast/Actors: Dhanush, Kriti Sanon, Prakash Raj, Tota Roy Choudhury and more
Tere Ishk Mein Director: Aanand L. Rai
Tere Ishk Mein Production House: Colour Yellow Productions and T-Series Films
Tere Ishk Mein Movie Release Date: 28 November 2025
Tere Ishk Mein Movie Available On: Theatrical Release
Tere Ishk Mein Released/Available In Languages: Hindi , Tamil , Telugu
Tere Ishk Mein Movie Runtime: 2h 47m
Tere Ishk Mein Movie Review:
Director Aanand L. Rai gets it better this time, after serious missteps in his three previous outings, Zero (2018), Atrangi Re (2021) and Raksha Bandhan (2022).
To begin with, the title tune (AR Rahman) lingers.
Aanand also makes a film that’s well-shot with powerful moments. Like the one where Shankar Gurukkal (Dhanush) tells Mukti (Kriti Sanon) that such a beautiful girl’s hand must land on a cheek and slaps himself hard with her hand. It was there in the promo.
Along with writers Himanshu Sharma and Neeraj Yadav, Aanand has an interesting premise. A Pygmalion layer with genders reversed and violence without cause added. Mukti’s thesis that violence can be permanently driven out of a brutal human with jobless, violence-prone Shankar as a test case, lays a promisingly different foundation.
Except that it goes horribly wrong.
She is upper crust, the educated daughter of an IAS officer, a Joint Secretary (Tota Roy Choudhury).
He is the uneducated son of a notary (Prakash Raj) who sits outside courts.
For her, he’s an experiment. No emotions involved. She has spelt it out in so many words.
For him, she’s a love so potent, he can turn from beast to human, anything for her. Emotions drive him, they did even in his childhood.
Unrequited love (like Dhanush faced in Rai’s own Raanjhanaa). It has consequences unimaginable.
There are curious threads. Has Mukti been callous in playing with his feelings or was there a good intent like spotting his potential during her experiment? When the chances of reciprocal love were dim with differences so vast, what were Shankar and his dad celebrating?
With Mukti in a grey area and Shankar in a dangerous zone, it is a premise for explosion.
And Aanand does explode the screen with Shankar’s self-destructively desperate measures.
But, unlike Pygmalion, there’s convolution in Rai’s zig-zag narration. Timelines dizzy.
Lawyer Gurukkal’s entry where he seems to be a lawyer on friendly terms with the men in khaki is a mismatch with who he’s finally shown to be.
Mukti is an obvious feminist. But using her good looks to push her thesis is at variance, in fact the thesis itself, is faulty. Can violence be driven out only by falling in love? How many patients can you cure of beastliness with that prescription?
It raises more questions.
For a counsellor who keeps saying, “I can handle it,” handling it is precisely where she keeps failing.
Considering she’s around to assess the mental health of defence personnel, anxiety pills, cigarettes (secondary smoke also with Shankar puffing away), alcohol and high-strung emotions make pregnant Mukti more of a basket case than her patients.
The sequences of the IAS officer bringing down Shankar and then his father turn into routine class divides with ensuing humiliation. The unfeeling rich, the emotional poor.
The storytelling is also circuitous and overlong.
Apart from the title tune, AR Rahman’s work does not offer anything memorable to take home.
Also, who’s the priest (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) who suddenly appears, puns on the name Mukti and makes profound-sounding predictions to Shankar topped with ‘Har har Mahadev’ on the burning ghats of Varanasi?
On the other hand, Aanand has effective moments with Dhanush in top form. Kriti Sanon too carries off the upper-class girl pretty well, as Mukti stumbles around emotionally.
And maybe, the many questions it raises will make fodder for discussion which is what cinema sometimes sets out to do.
Watch it or not: It’s different. It’s combustible. It’s lengthy. It’s complicated. If all these elements work for you, do watch it for something that’s definitely not routine.
Tere Ishk Mein Movie Review Score Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (i.e. 2.5/5)
Tere Ishk Mein Official Trailer:
Credits: T-Series
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