Main Vaapas Aaunga review: Diljit Dosanjh leads Imtiaz Ali's weakest film

Main Vaapas Aaunga movie review: Imtiaz Ali's Main Vaapas Aaunga follows a grandson decoding his dying grandfather's Partition memories. The film reaches for grief and belonging, but its pacing and politics blunt the impact.

In Short

• Main Vaapas Aaunga explores Partition's pain and uprootedness
• Naseeruddin Shah shines; Diljit Dosanjh underused
• The film's pacing drags and romance lacks chemistry

Partition dramas are rarely easy to watch. They are meant to hurt. Even decades later, the stories of displacement, separation and loss continue to feel painfully immediate. In Main Vaapas Aaunga, Imtiaz Ali tries to capture that ache of uprootedness and the longing for a home left behind. The emotions are visible. The problem is that the film has little else to offer around them.

The story begins with an ageing Ishar Singh, fondly called Keenu (Naseeruddin Shah), behaving erratically on his deathbed. While his family waits for him to die peacefully, something from his past refuses to let him go. Enter his grandson Nirvair (Diljit Dosanjh), who flies in from London to see him one last time and gradually begins piecing together the mystery.

Keenu constantly talks about Martians, World War II, the moon and church, among many other gibberish things, leaving Nirvair to decode his incoherent thoughts. His search eventually leads him to Sargodha and to a love story buried beneath the wounds of Partition.

The film moves between present-day Delhi and pre-Partition Punjab. In flashbacks, Vedang Raina plays the young Keenu, who falls in love with Afsana aka Mallika Dilfareb (Sharvari). The two meet in secret and believe their relationship can survive religious differences. Neither realises how quickly the world around them is about to change.

The pain of leaving one's home - or being forced to leave it - is something the film captures effectively in parts. AR Rahman's music often helps create that emotional atmosphere. Yet the storytelling struggles to sustain it.

At nearly every turn, Main Vaapas Aaunga feels longer than it needs to be. Scenes simply go on without adding emotional weight. The narrative moves in circles before arriving at points that the audience has already understood. By the interval, the film has spent so much time establishing its grief that the grief itself begins to lose its impact.

That is also the biggest surprise. Imtiaz Ali's best films are layered without being heavy-handed. They leave audiences with questions, discoveries and emotional residue. Here, the familiar ingredients remain - love, memory, longing and personal journeys - but the final dish never comes together.

The love story itself is another weak link. Raina and Sharvari show sincerity, but the chemistry between them never becomes strong enough to justify the emotional investment the film demands. Their romance remains more of an idea than an experience. As a result, much of the film's emotional foundation feels shaky.

Naseeruddin Shah is effortlessly compelling, even in a role built largely around memories and fragments. Diljit Dosanjh, however, is surprisingly underutilised. His character spends much of the film reacting to events rather than driving them.

The film's politics is even more complicated.

Main Vaapas Aaunga is deeply sympathetic to those uprooted by Partition. That sympathy is understandable. But at times, the film seems so consumed by the loss of home that it begins to romanticise displacement itself.

At one point, Nirvair suggests that those who migrated to India after Partition spent their lives feeling like strangers on their own land. It is a striking line, but also a slightly troubling one. The tragedy of Partition was that people lost their homes. The triumph of its survivors was that they built new ones. The film appears far more interested in the former than the latter.

A similar discomfort emerges through an anonymous refugee's reflection, featuring in the film as a written quote: "Between leaving my home and choosing my life, I would have gladly chosen death. But nobody asked me."

The line is intended to be heartbreaking. It is. But it also raises uncomfortable questions. There is something unsettling about a world-view that treats survival as a compromise and death as a purer form of belonging. Memory deserves to be honoured, but not at the cost of diminishing the value of life itself.

The film also simplifies some of Partition's complexities. Violence is frequently framed through a chain of reactions, creating the impression that one community's brutality is a response to another's. The film shows Muslim mobs turning violent after witnessing trains filled with murdered Muslims. On paper, that may seem like an attempt to explain violence. In practice, it creates a troubling chronology: one side appears to react, the other appears to initiate.

In a story about one of the bloodiest and most chaotic chapters in Indian history - where Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs all suffered unimaginable losses - such framing feels limiting and even triggering.

Equally puzzling is the film's reluctance to name Pakistan despite being rooted in the history of Partition. We hear about homes left behind, borders crossed and memories carried across generations. We even travel to Sargodha. Yet the country itself remains oddly absent from the conversation. Almost like the film wants the emotional weight of Partition without fully engaging with the political reality that created it.

Visually, however, the film often impresses. The cinematography creates beautiful compositions, particularly in the pre-Partition sequences. Faces are allowed to carry history, and the interplay of light and shadow frequently conveys more than the dialogue does.

Rahman's music also provides occasional emotional momentum, though surprisingly few songs leave a lasting impression beyond the film.

At one point, a character remarks about a destination, "Ghoom ghoom ke jana padta hai, bahot waqt lagta hai." The dialogue unintentionally describes the film itself.

Main Vaapas Aaunga wants to be a conversation between generations - between those who lived through Partition and those who inherited its memories. It wants to explore grief, belonging, identity and reconciliation. These are worthy ambitions. But ambition alone cannot sustain a film.

The supporting cast - Rajat Kapoor, Sanjay Suri, Anjana Sukhani, Manish Chaudhari and Banita Sandhu - keeps the momentum going. However, none of them delivers a particularly memorable performance.

What remains is a visually handsome drama weighed down by its pacing, weakened by an unconvincing romance and burdened by ideas that are more questionable than profound. The longing is real. The emotion is sincere. The storytelling, unfortunately, never catches up.

Quite an unlikely Imtiaz Ali film. Especially for those who love Imtiaz Ali films.

- Ends