Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari Review: Walking into the theatre for Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari feels like stepping into a familiar ballroom where the chandeliers have just been polished and the band is tuning its instruments. You already know the waltz, after all, Shashank Khaitan choreographed this dance once before, almost a decade ago, with Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania and Badrinath Ki Dulhania. Those films stitched a new grammar of the modern romcom for millennials, embroidered with chart-topping music, effervescent casts, and scripts that glittered with wit and simplicity. They spoke to an audience in flux, people growing out of the dreamy optimism of the 2000s and stepping into the practical chaos of urban India. And here we are again, years later, watching Khaitan attempt to hand down the same heirloom charm to a Gen-Z audience. The good news? The sparkle hasn’t dulled.
The film is at once hilariously boisterous, romantically tender, and quietly observant of the cultural tides of its time. Nostalgia hangs in the air like the scent of old jasmine, yet the rhythm is contemporary enough to keep you tapping your foot. One feels the old grammar of Bollywood romance being gently remixed for an era that scrolls on reels, swipes for validation, and uses vocabulary like “situationships” to define emotions once considered sacred.
The story begins with a grand, almost absurd tableau: Varun Dhawan’s Sunny Sanskari, clad in a Baahubali costume, preparing to propose to his beloved Ananya (Sanya Malhotra) in a spectacle of filmi devotion. The image is instantly comic and revealing, love here is performance, love is exaggeration, love is still very much a stage. But as in every great romcom, the balloon of joy bursts in the very next beat. Ananya admits her parents have already chosen Vikram (Rohit Saraf) for her, and worse, she dismisses Sunny as nothing more than a situationship. The word stings not only Sunny but the audience too, a reminder of how modern relationships are often whittled down to ambiguous, fragile labels.
In that rejection lies the first crack of heartbreak, but Khaitan is clever enough not to sink into melodrama. Instead, he pivots towards comedy, and introduces Janhvi Kapoor’s Tulsi Kumari, Vikram’s abandoned sweetheart. A simple schoolteacher with heartbreak stitched into her every gesture, Tulsi is the counterpoint to Sunny’s flamboyance. Unlike Sunny, who hides his pain with bravado and humour, Tulsi wears her emotions openly. She sobs, she vents, she remembers, and she allows her heartbreak to spill into the world around her. Where he is dramatic in a performative, comic way, she is dramatic in her rawness, unafraid to show her grief or her anger. Their chemistry is born not out of silence but out of shared vulnerability, the chaos of two broken hearts colliding in loud, messy honesty.
