The Grandmother Who Wouldn’t Stay QuietI keep thinking about the moment in
Daadi Ki Shaadi when Vimla Ahuja—played by Neetu Kapoor with a quiet, stubborn dignity—sits alone on her Shimla veranda, scrolling through Facebook. The camera lingers on her face as she reads a comment from a distant relative:
"Dadi, you’re getting married? At 72? What will people say?" She exhales, almost a laugh, and types back:
"People have been saying things since I was 12. I stopped listening at 30." It’s a small moment, barely a beat in a film that often shouts, but it’s the one that stayed with me. Because in that second, the movie remembers what it wants to be: not just a farce about a wedding that isn’t happening, but a story about a woman who refuses to disappear.

That refusal is the film’s most radical idea—and its most compromised.
Daadi Ki Shaadi arrives in 2026 with the premise of a gently subversive family comedy: what if the matriarch, long widowed and quietly sidelined, decided to remarry? What if the real scandal wasn’t her age, but the fact that she still wanted love? It’s a premise that could have been
Badhaai Ho’s older, wiser cousin—messy, warm, and unafraid to let its characters be flawed. Instead, it often feels like a film caught between two impulses: the desire to challenge, and the fear of offending.
Director Ashish R. Mohan has spent his career in the trenches of Bollywood’s broadest comedies—
Khiladi 786,
Welcome 2 Karachi, the
Golmaal franchise—where chaos is king and subtlety is a four-letter word. Here, he tries to pivot to something more tender, but the DNA of those earlier films keeps leaking in. The first act crackles with the kind of escalating misunderstandings that would make Rohit Shetty proud: a Facebook post misread, a fake fiancé invented, a gambling debt concocted to explain why a 72-year-old widow might suddenly need to marry a retired colonel. The humor is loud, physical, and often funny in the way of a well-oiled sitcom—think
Modern Family with more saris and fewer punchlines that land.
But then the film remembers it’s supposed to be about something. And that’s when the trouble starts.
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The second act is where
Daadi Ki Shaadi begins to unravel, not because the story loses its way, but because the film can’t decide how to tell it. The tonal whiplash is jarring: one scene will play like a slapstick farce (Kapil Sharma’s Tony Kalra, the lovable goofball, getting tangled in a curtain while trying to eavesdrop), and the next will pivot to a heavy-handed lecture about the emotional neglect of the elderly. The Hindu’s Anuj Kumar put it best: the film is "a gently subversive, commercially packaged provocation" that "stops short of being a true joyful rebellion." It’s as if the script keeps raising its hand to say,
"Wait, are we allowed to laugh at this?" before defaulting to the safest, most sentimental option.