Kho Gaye Hum Kahan Review: A Smart and Self-Satisfied Swipe at the Social Media Generation

Director: Arjun Varain Singh
Writers: Zoya Akhtar, Arjun Varain Singh, Reema Kagti, Yash Sahai

Cast: Siddhant Chaturvedi, Ananya Panday, Adarsh Gourav, Kalki Koechlin, Rohan Gurbaxani

Runtime: 134 minutes

Streaming on: Netflix

Kho Gaye Hum Kahan is the latest entry in a Bollywood genre canon I call ‘banana-bread film-making’. It has a very specific urban-poor aesthetic. The Mumbai we see looks like it’s vaping at an indie music gig in Bandra. Youngsters think in English but speak in Hinglish. They don’t work, they vibe. When things go bad, it rains. There are no seasons, there are fashion shows of feelings (Fall/Monsoon Collection). Friends don’t just smoke in a room, they smoke weed in a mod-hipster apartment with wide windows and beanbags on terraces. Water is a mood. Breezy OAFF-Savera and Ankur Tewari songs edit time with an Instagram filter called ‘Wake Up Sid, it’s Gehraiyaan’. Pubs have perfectly faded blue or green walls. The kids drink craft beer, cocktails or tequila shots. Even the character names sound like they don’t sweat, they perspire to make the skin glow. 

It’s easy to be cynical about banana-bread film-making (a spiritual sibling of ‘yoga storytelling’). The tone is super-folksy, especially to those who make a living in Mumbai. But I dig it. I have a fondness for this style, as long as it internalises the narrative themes. The noirish design of Gehraiyaan (2022), for instance, reflected the tension between class, trauma and aspiration; the treatment itself was the psychological palette. Arjun Varain Singh’s directorial debut, Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, is similarly impressive. The tone doesn’t exist for millennial kicks — it reflects the mental frame-rate of the digital generation. It depicts mid-twenties yuppies the way they see the world. 

The film revolves around three friends and the inextricable impact of social media on their lives. Imaad (Siddhant Chaturvedi), Ahana (Ananya Panday) and Neil (Adarsh Gourav) are the inseparable childhood pals that make Mumbai look cool. The keypad bond is strong. Imaad, a stand-up comedian addicted to Tinder flings, is flatmates with Ahana, a corporate stooge who looks for social media validation after a painful break-up. Neil is a gym instructor who dreams of celebrity endorsements, while kind-of-dating an Instagram influencer named Lala (whose personality seems to be an ode to Nikki Walia from Luck By Chance). 

Manufacturing Friction and Avoiding Tropes

Conflict rears its whitened fangs when a fall-out happens over Imaad’s provocative new comic set, which takes a swipe at Neil’s lovelife. Some of the punchlines are admittedly funny: “His girlfriend doesn’t scream in bed, she gives a shout-out. He doesn’t find her G-spot, he presses the bell icon.” But male egos are bruised and raw nerves are cooked. The man-trum is co-writer Zoya Akhtar’s signature dish: The one here is a descendant of the spats in Luck By Chance (2009), Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011) and Gully Boy (2019) – where pent-up envy comes cloaked as unkind words. Ahana tries to play peacemaker, not because she’s that diplomatic friend, but because the three have recently joined forces to launch Neil’s gym venture. She’s put in her papers to focus on it, so there’s no turning back. Imaad’s investment in the company (which brings to mind a sub-plot of Made In Heaven) lingers over their domestic discord. 

There’s a lot to appreciate in Kho Gaye Hum Kahan. It’s a rare Indian film whose reading of social media goes beyond the mandatory video-goes-viral-nation-falls device. It understands the language of electronic expression — the role that phones play not just in everyday life, but also in the way we think and desire. Everyone is at once connected and not connected, invisible and seen, isolated and popular. Ahana’s track, in particular, is alarmingly accurate. Once her boyfriend dumps her, Ahana floats down the wormhole of online stalking and revenge-bod posturing. She suspects that he’s with someone else, but instead of resorting to real-world drama, Ahana manufactures a sexy-carefree persona on her social media to get his attention. When he does crawl back, his actions are determined by her digital performance rather than her actual feelings. He thinks she’s moved on, whereas this was her method of ‘winning him back’ — a chasm addressed in a scene where Ahana’s shame reveals the tragedy of cyber flexing. It’s a well-observed snapshot of contemporary attachment. 

A Creative Visual Approach

The little visual touches do the trick. A scene that features Ahana stalking his profile on a smoke break at work opens with a top-angle shot of the staircase — implying the start of her ‘spiral’ down a maze of no return. There’s another scene that amplifies the tension between Ahana and her cellphone as if this were a dark psychological thriller; her fingers ache for the comforting void of the touchscreen. At another point, she takes a selfie, applies a black-and-white filter, and googles ‘loneliness quotes’ to feign depth and gain traction on her post. Such moments hit so close to home that I expect a hashtag like #FeelSeen to trend with the release.

I also like how — owing to the socio-economic gap between the friends — Neil’s angst stems from a darker and more oppressive space. He’s the one who pushes Imaad after the stand-up routine. His experience with Lala sharpens his persecution complex and general disillusionment with the system. As a result, his life slowly crumbles into the origin story of a troll. At one point, after a bad day, Neil vents in the only way he can — hurling abuse in the comments’ section of celebrity Instagram pages (including Karan Johar, of course). It’s a sharp moment, one that dissects the anatomy of the character’s rage, while also speaking to the larger malaise of society and its fraught relationship with privilege. The fact is that Neil is from a middle-class Catholic family with no connections or generational wealth. His only currency is social currency. That’s when his identity (their flat is in a society called ‘Roots’) bubbles to the fore. Adarsh Gourav lends the right edge to this role, walking the fine line between teetering on the brink and retaining his agency. The casting works wonders; it extends the insider-outsider narrative to the screen. It’s why the three actors naturally gel together. At the back of our mind, this chemistry is derived not only from fictional camaraderie but also their ability to bypass the shortcomings of modern discourse. Panday is the most effective as Ahana, because she isn’t portraying a character so much as a version of an upscale Gen-Z striver. There’s a lived-in ease about the way she plays a friend, a companion, and a young woman who is both at odds and in sync with her immediate surroundings. 

Conspicuous Messaging and Neat Arcs

But Kho Gaye Hum Kahan is also far from flawless. For all its cool packaging, it stumbles where recent Tiger Baby productions have. (I’m looking at you, Made In Heaven 2). There’s a sense of cultural entitlement about the way it offers a clean-cut resolution to every conflict. It has a virtue-signalling problem. In that context, it’s not too different from the preachy social-message dramas that insist on being the diagnosis as well as the cure. Apparently, there’s nothing that can’t be solved by a public confession. When a character does something as vengeful as hacking an ex’s profile, he is vindicated solely by a hurried and ‘heartfelt’ Instagram apology. A montage of tearful people reading his story is the only kind of repercussion this film accepts. There's also the all-inclusive voiceover syndrome, where people literally spell out the moral subtext of the premise. 

While most Hindi films tell the audience what to feel, films like this tell the audience how to think. Presenting Imaad as a stand-up comic who has an opinion on everything is the right way to do it. But equipping said comic with a therapist and an enigmatic photographer (there's an essay waiting to be written about the type-casting of Kalki Koechlin in Zoya Akhtar-Reema Kagti projects) who's shooting a “Humans of Tinder” project is the wrong way to do it. Having her become a human exposition device and unironically say things like “we are all digitally connected by we've never been lonelier before” is the wrong way. Having a character sign off with unnecessary nuggets of wisdom (“so let's keep our phones away”) and basic epiphanies like “who needs followers when we have friends?” is the wrong way. The ribbon-wrapped righteousness of it all is off-putting. As is the tokenism of its diversity: Singh, Ali and Pereira are the surnames. If the intent is to normalise it, the motif can’t be so conspicuous.

This extends to a broader issue with buddy movies. Why is it that every arc must mirror the other in terms of highs and lows? Why can't lives have their own rhythms? When Ahana goes through a low phase, Imaad and Neil have corresponding low points. When there is hope, it spreads across the three boards. Somehow, they’re narratively joined at the hip. That's why movies like Dil Chahta Hai and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara broke through the clutter. When Akash got his happily ever after, he used his joy to mend bridges and empathise with a grief-stricken Sid. Arjun's rising fortunes rarely coincided with the downturns of Kabir and Imraan. Perhaps the proximity of the three in Kho Gaye Hum Kahan forces their fates to bleed into each other; a spat has a knock-on effect, preventing them from escaping each other’s influence. But the synchronisation is too tidy. As a result, it ends up selling the brand of big-city friendships with airbrushed stealth. It unfolds smartly, yet with the inevitability of sponsored content. Consequently, you don’t just discuss this film, you amplify its reach. You don’t just like this film – you like, share and subscribe.