There is a strange irony in the title ‘Chand Mera Dil’. The film desperately wants to be your moon, your heart, your everything—a musical romance, a family drama, a self-aware Bollywood satire, and a generational conflict story. Instead, it ends up being nothing at all.
Ananya Panday and Lakshya starrer, directed by debutant Vivek Soni and produced by Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions, is a film that mistakes volume for emotion and confusion for complexity.
The plot that isn’t
The film follows Chand (Ananya Panday), a bubbly London-based singer-songwriter, and Dilsher (Lakshya), a brooding Punjabi musician from a family that considers music a “timepass.” He is the grandson of a legendary classical vocalist (Rana Daggubati) but wants to do fusion. She is dealing with an absent father (Parmeet Sethi). They meet. They clash. They sing. They fall in love. They break up. They reunite. Then they break up again. Then the film ends. Or maybe it doesn’t—by the two-hour-thirty-minute mark, it is hard to care.
The problem: too many ideas, no execution
The fundamental problem with ‘Chand Mera Dil’ is not lack of ambition. It is the inability to execute any of its ambitions competently.
It wants to be a musical, but the songs (composed by Sachin-Jigar) are forgettable, placed arbitrarily, and lip-synced with the enthusiasm of actors who know they are not singers.
It wants to be a family drama, but the conflicts are resolved in two-minute montages set to generic background scores.
It wants to be a satire of Bollywood’s obsession with Punjabi culture, but it is itself guilty of every stereotype it pretends to mock—the colorful turbans, the sprawling farmhouses, the loud weddings, the “oh my god, he is so intense” hero who communicates only in glares.
Ananya Panday and Lakshya: trying, but failing
Ananya Panday tries. She cries on cue. She dances energetically. She delivers her lines with practiced earnestness. But the script gives her nothing to hold onto. Her Chand is supposed to be “quirky,” which in Bollywood shorthand means: wears mismatched socks, makes random animal noises, and has no actual personality beyond being lovable.
Lakshya, who impressed in ‘Kill’ (2023), is wasted as the brooding hero who speaks in monosyllables and has exactly one expression—intense. His character’s conflict (classical vs. fusion, family tradition vs. personal freedom) is resolved so easily that one wonders why it was a conflict at all.
Rana Daggubati and the wasted supporting cast
Rana Daggubati plays the legendary vocalist grandfather with dignity and gravitas. He is also given almost nothing to do. Like every other supporting actor—Parmeet Sethi, Kanwaljit Singh, and Grusha Kapoor—he is present to move the plot forward when the leads cannot figure out how.
The music: quantity over quality
The film has nine songs. Nine. For a romantic musical, that is not necessarily a problem. But when the songs are indistinguishable from each other—all mid-tempo, all synthetically orchestrated, all featuring the same sweeping drone shots of European and Punjabi landscapes—they blur into one long, exhausting noise.
The title track is the best of the lot, and even that is unlikely to stay in your playlist beyond the week of release.
The cinematography and production design
To be fair, the film looks beautiful. Jay Oza’s cinematography captures the lush greens of Punjab and the golden hues of London equally well. The production design—opulent mansions, fairy-lit sangeet stages, charming London flats—is easy on the eye.
But a pretty exterior does not compensate for an empty interior.
Who is this film for?
This is the question that haunts ‘Chand Mera Dil’. It is too cheesy for audiences who like grounded romance. It is too confused for audiences who like pure escapism. It is too long for anyone who has a weekday evening to spare.
Perhaps it is for the “Karan Johar school of filmmaking” loyalists—the ones who cried during ‘Ae Dil Hai Mushkil’ and memorized every dialogue from ‘Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani’. But even they will find this film a pale imitation of the genre it desperately wants to belong to.
Final verdict
‘Chand Mera Dil’ is not unwatchable. It is simply… there. It exists. It will play on Netflix six months from now, and people will scroll past it without pausing. For a film that tries so hard to be everything, that is perhaps the saddest outcome.
