Dil Kya Kare
- Director
- Prakash Jha
- Studio
- Devgan Entertainment SoftwareDevgan Arts
- Release Date
- 24 September 1999
- Language
- Hindi
- Country
- India
- Budget
- ₹9.00 Cr
- Box Office
- ₹19.69 Cr
Review
This melodramatic catastrophe mistakes emotional manipulation for genuine storytelling. The premise—two strangers meeting on a hijacked train, conceiving a child, and reuniting years later through their daughter—has potential, but director squanders it by drowning the narrative in overwrought sentiment and convenient plot devices. Anand's perfect life crumbles the moment Nandita appears, yet we're given painfully thin character development to actually invest in anyone's dilemma. The wife Kavita becomes a reactive pawn rather than a complex woman grappling with betrayal, while Anand flip-flops between guilty conscience and protective husband without any real internal struggle. The performances feel trapped in this mire of melodrama—actors are doing heavy lifting against lazy writing, and it shows.
What infuriates me most is how the film treats its own central conflict as mere soap opera fodder. A train attack, a forgotten night, a secret child—these could anchor genuine psychological drama, but instead we get predictable tears and moral hand-wringing. Som Datt's unrequited love subplot feels like filler from a rejected draft. The climax presumably involves everyone having feelings at each other until something "resolves," because that's how these films operate. There's no wit, no nuance, no acknowledgment that real people caught in such situations would be devastated and confused in ways far messier than what's presented here.
Rating: 5/10
Storyline
So there's this guy Anand who's living what seems like a perfect life with his wife Kavita and their adopted daughter Neha. They're a happy family, though Kavita had to adopt after losing her biological child. There's also this friend Som Datt hanging around who's secretly had feelings for Kavita forever, but she has no idea. One day, Kavita notices some mysterious woman keeps showing up to see Neha at school, which totally freaks her out. When she finally confronts this woman, things get really complicated really fast.
It turns out the woman calls herself Nandita, and she wants to build a relationship with Neha. Kavita, being cautious but also curious, lets her stay with them for a bit. But then the moment Nandita and Anand see each other face-to-face, everything explodes. Turns out these two have a serious history together that neither of them expected to resurface. Years ago, they were both on a train when it got attacked by bandits, and something happened between them that night that neither of them ever talked about afterward.
What makes this whole situation absolutely wild is that neither of them knew anything about each other back then—no names, no contact info, nothing. They basically disappeared from each other's lives without a word. But what they didn't realize was that their encounter had major consequences, and now all these years later, those consequences are literally sitting right in front of them in the form of their daughter. The whole foundation of their family suddenly becomes shaky when all these buried secrets come tumbling out.
