Okay. I’m done. Completely and utterly wrecked. My brain feels like scrambled eggs and my eyes are burning but I can’t sleep. I can’t move. I just finished Saiyaara on Prime Video and… what? What was that? It’s 2 AM and the silence in my room is screaming.
I started it on my couch, you know, the one with the weird dip in the middle from all the nights I’ve fallen asleep on it watching nonsense. Had a blanket pulled up to my chin, phone silenced for once. And I just… fell in. Hard. There’s this scene. It’s raining, like, *really* raining, the kind that feels like the sky is trying to wash the world away. And Meher is telling Zain this story about her grandfather, and she’s holding this little ceramic teacup, a pale blue one with a tiny crack near the rim that she’s glued back together herself. And her hand just… slips. It falls in slow motion, or maybe that’s just my brain adding drama, and it shatters on the floor. But the camera… god, the camera didn’t just show the cup breaking. It dove in. It got right up close to one specific shard, and for a split second, you could see the entire scene reflected in it: the rain-streaked window, Meher’s face crumpling, and Zain, just standing there, his own eye staring back from the tiny piece of broken pottery. I literally gasped. Like, a full-body, sharp intake of breath. I leaned so far forward I almost fell off the couch. That shot. That one tiny, perfect, impossible shot is just burned into the back of my eyelids now.
It reminded me of this stupid mug I had when I was a kid. It had a cartoon rocket ship on it and I thought it was the greatest thing in the universe. I dropped it in the kitchen and the handle broke off. I cried for hours. My dad tried to fix it with this super glue that smelled like chemicals and death, but you could always see the seam. You could always feel it when you picked it up. A little ridge of imperfection. A reminder. I don’t know why I thought of that. It’s not even the same. Whatever.
The whole movie is like that. Zain, the architect, drawing these perfect, clean lines, trying to build a world that makes sense. And Meher, the potter, literally making things out of mud, embracing the lumps and the cracks and the beautiful chaos of it all. It’s so on the nose, right? It should be annoying. And for a minute, I thought it was. I was like, okay, we get it, order vs. chaos, neat vs. messy. But then… it just works. It just gets under your skin. I had to pause it halfway through to make more tea (ironic, I know) and when I came back, the screen saver on my TV had popped up, that floating orb thing, and it felt so jarringly perfect and digital compared to the messy, human feel of the movie. Felt like I broke the spell for a second.
And the ending. Don’t even get me started on the ending. She’s just… gone. He walks into her studio and it’s empty. Except for one new pot on the wheel, still wet, perfectly formed. Is she a ghost? Did she ever exist? Was she just a metaphor for his acceptance of imperfection? I thought it was beautiful when I was watching it. Poetic. But now that I’m lying here in the dark, typing this into my phone… was it kind of a cop-out? Like, the writer couldn’t figure out how to end it so they just went *poof*? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know if I love it or if I’m mad at it. My feelings are doing that thing where they’re changing every five seconds.
I feel so empty and so full at the same time. My heart hurts a little. That’s so dumb to say about a movie, but it’s true. I keep looking around my room, at all my things, neatly arranged on my shelves, and I’m suddenly seeing all the little flaws. The chip on my bookend. The scratch on my laptop. And they don’t look like mistakes anymore. They just look like… life. God, I need to go to sleep. This movie has broken my brain.
9/10. I think. Maybe 8. Whatever. I’m done.
—raghu