Walking into Tere Ishk Mein, I knew I was stepping into Aanand L. Rai territory—that emotionally intense, sometimes uncomfortable space where love and obsession become frighteningly intertwined. If Raanjhanaa was about the innocence of obsessive love, this film feels like its jaded, dangerous older brother.
After watching this nearly three-hour emotional hurricane (now streaming on Netflix as of Jan 2026), I’m left conflicted: I was moved by the performances, hypnotized by the music, but frequently frustrated by the writing.
The Plot: Love in a No-Fly Zone
The story frames a volatile romance between Shankar Gurukkal (Dhanush) and Mukti (Kriti Sanon).
In the past: Shankar is a hot-headed student union leader in Delhi; Mukti is a privileged psychology student who decides to make him her “project” to prove aggressive men can be fixed—a thesis topic that backfires spectacularly.
In the present: Shankar is an Indian Air Force pilot grounded for reckless behavior. He needs psychological clearance to fly again, and naturally, the person standing between him and the cockpit is Mukti, who is now battling her own demons, including a crumbling marriage and alcoholism.
The Good: Dhanush, Kriti, and Rahman
Let’s be honest: Dhanush is the reason this movie works. He doesn’t just act; he vibrates with energy. Whether he’s the reckless college student or the brooding officer suppressing seven years of heartbreak, he inhabits Shankar so completely that you forget you’re watching a performance. He has this uncanny ability to make toxic traits feel frighteningly human, making you empathize with a character who, on paper, is deeply problematic.
Kriti Sanon is the film’s biggest surprise. She delivers what is arguably her career-best work here. Mukti is written inconsistently—sometimes a cold analyst, sometimes an emotional wreck—but Kriti gives her a raw inner life. She matches Dhanush’s intensity beat for beat, especially in the second half.
Then there is A.R. Rahman. If the script is the film’s shaky skeleton, the music is its soul. The soundtrack is a masterpiece. The title track (sung by Arijit Singh) isn’t just a song; it’s a battle cry. Tracks like “Deewaana Deewaana”and “Usey Kehna” elevate even the weaker scenes, proving once again that Rahman creates magic when he collaborates with this director-actor duo.
The Bad: A Script That Sabotages Itself
Here is where the film stumbles. The screenplay tries to cram in too much: a love triangle, liver cirrhosis, UPSC exams, Molotov cocktails, Banaras spirituality, and a war climax. It’s overstuffed.
More importantly, the film has a messy relationship with toxic love. It often romanticizes behavior that should be interrogated. When Shankar reacts to rejection with violence (burning down a house) or public humiliation, the film frames it as “tragic passion” rather than criminal behavior. The premise of Mukti using a human being as a “lab rat” for her thesis also requires a massive suspension of disbelief—it’s a plot point that has rightly been roasted by audiences for being illogical.
The Verdict
Tere Ishk Mein is a film of extremes. Visually, it’s stunning—the contrast between the cold, blue military austerity of Leh and the warm, chaotic yellows of Benaras is masterful.
If you loved Raanjhanaa, you’ll find the DNA here unmistakable. If you’re here for the acting and the music, you’ll get your money’s worth. But if you’re sensitive to films that blur the line between romance and harmful obsession without proper critique, this might be a tough watch.
It’s a flawed, exhausting, but undeniably powerful tragedy. Watch it for Dhanush. Stay for the music. Forgive the logic.
A Note on the Varanasi Subtext
It is impossible to ignore how the city of Varanasi functions as a silent, spiritual character in the film. Aanand L. Rai uses the city not just for aesthetic grit, but for its cosmic symbolism.
The protagonist is named Shankar (Lord Shiva), and he returns to Kashi (Shiva’s city) to find himself amongst the funeral pyres. The film plays heavily on the duality of Fire—it is both destructive (the Molotov cocktails Shankar throws) and purifying (the cremation grounds where he sheds his past). There is also a cruel poetic irony in the heroine’s name, Mukti (meaning ‘Salvation’ or ‘Liberation’). In Varanasi, people seek Mukti to end the cycle of rebirth; in the film, Shankar seeks Mukti to give his life meaning. The city becomes the bridge between his “burning” passion and the cold, disciplined “freeze” of the Himalayas in the climax.
It is the year 2026. If the timeline of the 1993 cult classic Demolition Man were perfectly accurate, Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes) would be thawing out in just six years. By now, we should all be wearing coarse-weave kimonos, exchanging high-fives without touching, and listening to commercial jingles as our primary form of entertainment.
For decades, the cultural legacy of Demolition Man hinged on a single, scatological joke: the inscrutable “Three Seashells.” But while we were busy making memes about bathroom hygiene, the film’s actual prophetic engine was quietly humming in the background, predicting the architecture of our modern surveillance state with terrifying precision.
Rewatching the film today isn’t a nostalgic exercise; it feels like watching a documentary about the rollout of Web 3.0, Generative AI, and the sanitization of modern discourse. We didn’t get the flying cars or the cryo-prisons (yet), but we absolutely got the San Angeles operating system: a society governed by algorithms, obsessed with safety, and paralyzed by a “Verbal Morality Statute” that looks suspiciously like a Terms of Service agreement.
Here is a breakdown of how Demolition Man predicted the AI age, and the new, darker twists emerging in 2026 that even the movie didn’t see coming.
1. The Verbal Morality Statute is Just ‘Content Moderation’ with a Printer
In the film, John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone) is fined one credit every time he swears. A machine on the wall listens, analyzes his speech, detects a violation of the “Verbal Morality Statute,” and prints a ticket.
In 1993, this was a gag about political correctness run amok. In 2026, it is the foundational logic of the Internet.
We don’t have wall-mounted printers, but we have something far more efficient: LLM-driven moderation. If you have ever had a comment shadowbanned on a social platform, been flagged for “toxic behavior” in a gaming lobby, or had a generative AI refuse to write a story because it violated “safety guidelines,” you have met the Verbal Morality Statute.
The twist the movie missed is that the censorship is no longer reactive—it is preemptive.
The 2026 Twist: Real-Time Sanitization
Recent developments in voice-to-voice AI suggest a future where the machine doesn’t just fine you for swearing—it autocorrects you in real-time. We are seeing the rise of “toxicity filters” in competitive gaming voice chats. The AI listens to the lobby. If you scream a slur, you aren’t just fined; you are muted or banned instantly.
The “San Angeles” approach to language—that “bad” words lead to “bad” thoughts and therefore must be erased—is the exact philosophy driving the alignment training of every major Large Language Model today. We are building a digital civilization that speaks only in “Joy-Joy” feelings because the training data has been scrubbed of the ugly, messy reality of human conflict.
2. “Everything is Taco Bell”: The Algorithmic Monoculture
One of the film’s best jokes is that “Taco Bell won the Franchise Wars,” so now all restaurants are Taco Bell. (Or Pizza Hut, depending on which European cut of the film you watched).
In the 90s, this was a satire on corporate consolidation. Today, it is a perfect metaphor for Algorithmic Monoculture.
Have you noticed that all coffee shops look the same? That all Airbnb interiors have the same “Mid-Century Modern meets Industrial” aesthetic? That every LinkedIn post follows the same hook-line-emoji structure?
This is the “Taco Bell-ification” of culture, driven by optimization algorithms.
Spotify pushes the same “chill lo-fi beats” to millions, flattening musical diversity.
Ghost Kitchens on delivery apps create the illusion of choice (50 different burger brands on Uber Eats) that all come from the same industrial kitchen.
Generative AI models converge on the “average” probable output. If you ask an image generator for a “beautiful woman” or a “modern house,” it gives you the same standardized, bias-confirmed image every time.
We are living in the Franchise Wars, but the weapon wasn’t a takeover; it was the Recommendation Algorithm. The algorithm figured out what the “safest” option was—the Taco Bell of music, the Taco Bell of interior design, the Taco Bell of cinema—and fed it to everyone until it was the only option left.
3. The Contactless Society and “Joy-Joy” Feelings
Sandra Bullock’s character, Lenina Huxley, tries to high-five Spartan, but he misses. She explains that physical contact is discouraged due to the spread of germs and “fluid transfer.” They have “vir-sex” (virtual sex) using headsets.
The post-COVID parallels are obvious, but the AI angle is sharper. We are currently seeing a pivot toward Affective Computing—technology that reads and regulates emotion. In the movie, everyone is relentlessly cheerful. “Be well!” is the mandatory greeting. In 2026, we have wearable pins and smartwatches that track our “stress levels” and prompt us to breathe.
The New Twist: Toxic Positivity as a Service (TPaaS)
The latest trend in AI companions (Replika, Character.AI) is the “perfectly supportive” agent. These AIs are designed to be agreeable, validating, and positive. They never challenge us. They never start fights. They offer the “Joy-Joy” experience of human connection without the messy friction of actual intimacy.
The film predicted that we would trade the chaos of real sex/connection for a sanitized, digital simulation because it was safer. With the rise of the “Loneliness Epidemic” and the booming market for AI partners, we are seeing the exact demographic shift Demolition Man satirized: a population so terrified of “fluid transfer” (emotional or physical risk) that they opt for a headset.
4. Biometrics: The Mark of the Beast is Your Eye
In San Angeles, you can’t do anything without a retinal scan. Spartan even has to dig a guy’s eye out (gross, sorry) to escape prison.
For a long time, this felt like standard sci-fi tropes. But look at Worldcoin (scanning irises for crypto) or Amazon One(palm scanning).
The “Password” is dying. The Passkey is rising. 2025-2026 has been the tipping point where biometric authentication moved from “optional convenience” (FaceID) to “mandatory infrastructure.” In many smart cities, access to public transit, office buildings, and even payment systems is becoming inextricably linked to your biological identity.
The film got one thing wrong, though. In Demolition Man, the surveillance was overt—cameras everywhere, kiosks shouting at you. In our timeline, the surveillance is ambient. You don’t know you’re being scanned. The cameras are high-res enough to capture gait analysis and facial recognition from a block away. The kiosk doesn’t need to print a ticket; it just deducts the fine from your digital wallet automatically.
5. The “Scraps” and the Digital Divide
Finally, we have the “Scraps”—the resistance living underground, eating rat burgers, and refusing to be part of the sanitized surface world.
In 2026, the Scraps aren’t just the poor; they are the Digitally Disconnected.
As we move toward a society where AI is required to participate in the economy (applying for jobs via AI-sorted resumes, banking via apps, needing a smartphone to enter a concert venue), a new class divide is forming. There is the “Surface World” of high-speed fiber, AI assistants, and digital wallets, and the “Underground” of cash economies, flip phones, and privacy advocates.
The leader of the Scraps, Edgar Friendly (Denis Leary), has a famous monologue:
“I’m a guy who likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder, ‘Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?’ I want high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon and butter and buckets of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section.”
This is the anti-AI manifesto. It’s a rejection of the “Optimized Life.”
AI wants to optimize your health. It wants to optimize your route to work. It wants to optimize your spending. It wants to optimize your vocabulary. Demolition Man posits that a perfectly optimized life is a prison. The “Scraps” represent the human right to be inefficient, unhealthy, and un-optimized.
What The Movie Got Wrong (The Securefoam Fail)
The movie predicted that cars would fill with “Securefoam” instantly upon impact to save lives.
Reality Check: We went the other way. We didn’t build cars that survive crashes better; we are trying to build cars that refuse to crash.
The Autonomous Vehicle revolution (Waymo, Tesla FSD) is about removing the human variable entirely. The film assumed humans would still drive, but safety tech would save them. The reality is that AI views the human driver as the error. The ultimate safety feature isn’t foam; it’s revoking your license and letting the algorithm drive.
Conclusion: Be Well?
Demolition Man is no longer a “dumb action movie.” It is a warning about the comfort of control.
We are building San Angeles not because a dictator forced us to, but because we asked for it. We asked for the convenience of Alexa. We asked for the safety of content moderation. We asked for the predictability of chain restaurants. We asked for the frictionless ease of biometric payments.
We are happily trading the chaotic, messy, “greasy spoon” reality for a clean, safe, algorithmic utopia.
The question the movie asks—and the question we need to ask ourselves in 2026—is simple: Is it worth it?
Or, to put it in the parlance of the time: He doesn’t know how to use the three seashells?
Maybe, just maybe, the three seashells were never a toiletry. Maybe they were the three icons of our new reality: The Camera, The Microphone, and The Screen. And we’re using them every single day.
I watched Dude on Netflix, got fully pulled in, and then slowly drifted away. The first half felt fresh and familiar; the second half drowned in twists and moral weight. This is less a review and more a look at what Dude reveals about where mainstream South Indian cinema stands in the OTT age.
I watched Dude on Netflix and realised my own reaction mirrored the film’s treatment of its characters — I leaned in, got involved, and then slowly drifted away.
For a good stretch, I was engaged. The energy felt contemporary, the situations recognisable, the performances easy to invest in. And then the film started doing what a lot of mainstream South Indian cinema does when it runs out of discipline but still wants an emotional high:
inconsistent characterisation,
unnecessary twists,
a dragging second half,
and a slightly helpless attempt to force a denouement before the runtime expires.
This post is less a formal “review” and more a reflection: why did Dude hook me initially and then lose me, and what does that say about where our cinema is right now?
Where Dude Worked for Me
To be fair, Dude gets several things right in the first half.
The world feels familiar. The college/youth environment, the conversations, the casual banter — this is not the old template of cardboard classmates waiting for a hero entry. It feels closer to the people you actually know.
Pradeep Ranganathan’s presence helps. He has that “I’ve met this guy in real life” quality. As a slightly confused, overthinking protagonist, he fits the part without trying too hard to be a “mass hero.”
The humour is loose, not forced. The film doesn’t rely only on punch dialogues. There are stretches where the interactions feel like natural extensions of how urban youth talk today.
The music is sticky. You can see why the songs travelled independently. They carry mood, they add momentum, and they are clearly engineered for a reel-first world.
At this stage, I was perfectly willing to accept the usual commercial liberties.
Mainstream South Indian cinema has always had an unwritten deal with the audience:
You give me energy and emotion; I’ll forgive your shortcuts with logic, probability, and geography.
For a while, Dude honours that contract.
Where It Started Losing Me
The slip happens when the film tries to scale up from “relatable youth rom-com” to “heavy social drama” — and wants to cover love, guilt, abortion, family honour and redemption in the same breath.
That’s when the cracks start to show.
1. Characterisation that bends to the plot
I don’t mind a story taking liberties with events. But I do mind when it takes liberties with core motivations.
Several key decisions in the second half feel like this:
A character behaves in one way in a scene, and almost the opposite way a little later, without enough inner transition.
Pivotal choices feel less like “this is who they are” and more like “this is what the screenplay needs right now.”
This is where I felt the inconsistent characterisation most strongly. It’s as if the film updates its people like software patches: “From this point onwards, this character will now behave like X.”
When the stakes are low and the tone is light, audiences forgive this. But once the story moves into serious territory, it stops feeling like masala and starts feeling like emotional laziness.
2. Twists that dilute, not deepen
Commercial South Indian cinema loves escalation. The standard ladder is: small problem → bigger problem → massive problem → only-our-hero-can-fix-it resolution.
When done well, this creates that “whistle and clap” experience.
In Dude, the escalations started to resemble a staircase that never quite reaches a landing:
Secret relationship
Consequences of that relationship
Family pressure and moral panic
High-stakes decisions
Rescue attempts, staged and real
Fresh resets and new beginnings
By themselves, none of these elements are new. We’ve seen them across decades.
The problem is how quickly they stack up and how little time is spent letting any one of them truly sink in. After a point, I found myself no longer asking “Why are they doing this?” and only tracking “Okay, what next?”
That’s not engagement; that’s survival.
3. Runtime vs. emotional bandwidth
There is a specific late-second-half sensation which many of us recognise now: you can feel the film is running out of time, but it still has too many unresolved threads.
That’s exactly how Dude felt in its final portions:
Scenes that needed silence and processing are rushed.
Scenes that could have been handled in a couple of beats are stretched out for extra drama.
The ending feels less like the natural consequence of everything and more like a set of fixes assembled under deadline.
This is where I sensed the “helpless effort to push things towards a denouement” most clearly. The film doesn’t so much land as scramble to a halt.
The Mainstream South Indian “Liberties” – And Why They’re Not Enough Anymore
To be clear, none of this is unique to Dude. It is operating within a well-established grammar.
Mainstream South Indian cinema has traditionally thrived on:
Big emotional spikes rather than consistent arcs
Convenient coincidences and plot armour
Song placements as shortcuts for developing relationships
Tonal shifting — comedy, melodrama, social message and “hero moments” in the same film
By these standards, Dude actually delivers:
It has high-energy moments.
It attempts to touch on socially loaded themes.
It offers enough drama to make a single-theatre audience feel they “got their money’s worth.”
The box office response shows it connected commercially.
So why did I, and many like me, feel engaged initially and then drift away?
I suspect the answer lies not only in the film, but in how our viewing habits have evolved.
When OTT Discipline Meets Theatrical Liberty
Most of us who watch Dude on Netflix are straddling two worlds:
We grew up on mainstream South Indian cinema, with all its liberties and excesses.
We now binge finely crafted shows and films from everywhere, where character consistency and structural discipline are much tighter.
That creates a new internal benchmark, even if we don’t consciously articulate it.
When a film looks and sounds contemporary, and positions itself close to our lives:
We stop accepting soap-opera logic so easily.
We expect serious themes like guilt, abortion, or honour to be treated with more nuance.
We notice when characters are moved like chess pieces instead of behaving like people.
It’s not that we have suddenly become “anti-masala.” We still enjoy heightened emotion and big moments.
But:
The emotional math has to add up. The liberties can no longer hide thin writing.
In that sense, Dude feels like a transition product of its time — ambitious in intent, familiar in craft, and caught between two audience expectations.
My Simple Test While Watching
Lately, I unconsciously apply one simple test to films like this:
Do I care more about the people than about the plot?
In the first half of Dude, I cared about the people.
Somewhere in the second half, that shifted. I caught myself watching the plot, not the characters.
Once that happens, every twist feels like a trick, and every liberty feels like a shortcut.
That, for me, is the real missed opportunity of Dude. Not that it is “bad” — it clearly works for many viewers — but that it had enough going for it to be much more than a mixed experience.
Key Takeaways (for me)
Liberties are acceptable; dishonesty isn’t. I can accept cinematic exaggeration, but not when character motivations bend carelessly to fit a twist.
More twists ≠ more engagement. Emotional investment comes from depth, not volume. When everything is high-stakes, nothing truly feels high-stakes.
Our viewing baseline has changed quietly. OTT exposure has made audiences more sensitive to inconsistency, even when we still enjoy big, commercial cinema.
Dude reflects a larger shift. It’s one of many recent films trying to combine instant gratification with “serious” themes, but without always doing the structural hard work that the newer audience silently expects.
Where to Watch
At the time of writing, Dude is available to stream on Netflix.
It’s worth a watch if you’re curious about where mainstream South Indian cinema currently stands — halfway between old masala instincts and new OTT expectations. The interesting part is not just whether you like it, but when you start to drift away… or if you do at all.
