‘Chand Mera Dil’ (2026) Movie Review - When Romance Turns Into Soft Propaganda

There is a stunning movie playing in the shadow of Vivek Soni's Chand Mera Dil, one about two college students who impulsively decide to become parents and sacrifice their dreams in pursuit of caring for their child. Their new parental responsibilities prove too overwhelming for these young, inexperienced minds, triggering emotional fallout that first strains and then breaks a bond that was superficial to begin with. Unfortunately, the movie currently playing in theaters only brushes against these ideas, choosing instead to become a cutesy, emotionally flat, and mind-bogglingly dim-witted Dharma production. Then again, this should not come as much of a surprise, considering this is the same studio behind junk like the Dhadak films, Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, Nadaaniyan, and Soni's two previous features, Meenakshi Sundareshwar and Aap Jaisa Koi. The mantra uniting all these titles—and several others from the same studio—is simple: no matter how prickly or important the subject, sand down the sharp edges with third-rate humor and an overdose of crowd-pleasing vibes, the kind that ultimately undercut the material's gravity.

The couple at the center of Chand Mera Dil, Aarav (Lakshya) and Chandni (Ananya Panday), are undergraduate students suddenly thrust into the world of parenting after a lot of sex and partying. And they do buckle under the pressure of feeding and caring for a baby while simultaneously studying for placements and working jobs to pay the bills. Yet Soni never takes things far enough. He avoids truly discomforting territory. Consider the pre-interval confrontation that leads Chandni to walk out of the relationship. The film establishes that Chandni had a traumatic childhood because of an abusive father who beat his wife. So when Aarav firmly and angrily grabs her cheeks, she packs her bags, picks up the baby, and leaves. The problem is that the fight itself feels neutered and sanitized. Voices are never raised too high, the domestic space is never allowed to become genuinely unpleasant, and Aarav never slaps or hits Chandni—he merely squeezes her cheeks too tightly. Even this act of violence is softened by Aarav's constant apologizing and by the film's insistence on reassuring us that he is not a bad guy. In fact, you might instead begin to see Chandni as the villain for mistreating Aarav and distancing him from both herself and the baby. Chand Mera Dil is no Thappad or Marriage Story. It is a glossy affair terrified of its own complexities.

A better version of Chand Mera Dil—that shadow movie—would have found traces of ugliness in Aarav's incel-like approach to wooing Chandni, where he goes to absurd lengths to wear the same colored clothes as her but never simply approaches her to say hello. That Aarav would have burned with jealousy after seeing Chandni date a boy who actually managed to walk up and talk to her. Or the film could have done something meaningful with Aarav's habit of smoking three cigarettes whenever he feels stressed instead of confronting the source of that stress directly, allowing resentment and irresponsibility to accumulate beneath the surface. This detail never returns during the parenting portions, even though it could have complicated Aarav by turning him into a man who breaks his promise to his wife about never smoking again. But Soni is determined to keep Aarav pleasant and sympathetic because the film is engineered around a happy ending. He wants the audience to cheer when Aarav and Chandni eventually reunite.

That happy ending fails on multiple levels. Most obviously, the film spends an exhausting amount of time arriving at a conclusion the audience can predict almost immediately once it becomes clear that Aarav is being framed as a fundamentally decent man deserving of redemption—and deserving of Chandni. More importantly, the ending undermines many of the film's own observations about parenthood. Once the baby is born, it becomes painfully obvious that Aarav and Chandni were never truly prepared for the responsibilities they took on, and that they proceeded with the pregnancy while operating under immature and romanticized assumptions about family life. During these stretches, Chand Mera Dil briefly stumbles upon an important truth: raising children is not as cute and cuddly as mainstream movies often glamorize it to be. The film even validates what Chandni's mother tells her: raising a family is a full-time job, not something meant for everyone, and certainly not something easy. In one scene, Chandni visits a mall to buy clothes for her child and notices three friends happily hanging out together. For a brief moment, you can sense her regretting her new life and wondering whether she became a mother too early.

But Soni never develops these ideas. Instead, the sugary ending arrives as reassurance that getting pregnant in your twenties is fine because everything will somehow work out ultimately. Career sacrifices become temporary inconveniences rather than life-altering consequences. Chandni lands a good corporate package, and although Aarav struggles professionally for a while, he never truly sacrifices his ambitions either. Through a series of contrivances, he still makes it to the United States for higher studies, and the film leaves you certain he will eventually secure the job of his dreams. Films like Chand Mera Dil can be more insidious than ones promoting dangerous right-wing propaganda because their messaging hides beneath candy-colored romance and soft emotional packaging. They normalize conservative fantasies about family and reproduction while pretending to offer harmless escapism. It's the kind of propaganda made by people anxious about falling fertility rates, eager to romanticize reproduction while glossing over the emotional and professional costs attached to it.

I was not a fan of Soni's ostentatious visual style in Meenakshi Sundareshwar and Aap Jaisa Koi, but Chand Mera Dil pushes his image-making even further into mediocrity. In several scenes, he employs frame-rate manipulation to transform moving vehicles into shiny, vibrant, almost hazy streaks that foreground Aarav and Chandni. But the technique often generates unintentional comedy instead of emotional intensity, especially during the sequence where Chandni leaps toward Aarav and the two fall onto a railway platform just as a train rushes past them. Is the shot supposed to suggest that this relationship is heading toward a collision? Is this meant to count as visual foreshadowing? Soni also struggles to calibrate tone in certain scenes, such as the one in which a boy reveals Aarav's situation to his parents by repeating what he hears from Aarav's sister: "Engineer banne bheja tha, baap ban ke aaye hai sahibzaade." The line feels funny even though the surrounding faces say otherwise.

In both Meenakshi Sundareshwar and Aap Jaisa Koi, the settings at least felt lived-in despite their decorative appearance. Chand Mera Dil, on the other hand, often looks as though it were shot entirely on artificial sets flooded with plastic lighting. Soni merely trades one shallow visual style for another shallow visual style. What remains unchanged is his obsession with aesthetic surface over emotional depth. Perhaps the day he decides to pursue authentic feeling instead of constantly drawing attention to his designs, he might finally make a film worth watching. Of course, that would probably also require distancing himself from Dharma Productions, a studio whose films are notorious for being shallow, insubstantial, and emotionally empty. Had the studio remained fully true to its values, the title of this movie might well have been Plastic Mera Dil.