Goodbye

Vikas Bahl's "Goodbye" reaches for something genuinely meaningful—a meditation on mortality, regret, and familial estrangement that could have been profound. The premise itself carries weight: a successful lawyer's neglect of her dying mother becomes the catalyst for reckoning within a scattered, dysfunctional family. Rashmika Mandanna carries the film with quiet intensity, and there are moments where her performance captures the raw sting of irreversible loss quite movingly. The supporting cast, particularly the ensemble dynamics when the siblings reunite, occasionally hits notes of authentic conflict and vulnerability. Bahl deserves credit for attempting to explore grief without melodrama—the film largely resists the temptation to wallow in sentimentality.

However, the execution falters where it matters most. The screenplay struggles to balance multiple storylines; the brothers scattered across LA, Everest, and Dubai feel more like plot devices than fully realized characters, and their individual arcs never cohere into anything substantial. The father's anger, which should be the emotional anchor, often plays as one-dimensional rather than tragically human. There's a hesitation in the storytelling, as though Bahl is afraid to push into the messy, uncomfortable spaces where real family drama lives. The second half particularly drags, repeating thematic beats rather than deepening them, and the resolution, while well-intentioned, feels somewhat pat for a film so concerned wi