1 Star (out of 4)
Watch Dilwali Diwali on Netflix
Dilwali Diwali (“A Heartfelt Diwali“) takes the setup for an amusing sitcom episode and turns it into a depressing slog about a family’s unresolved issues.
We are dropped in the middle of a crisis six months in the making. This would work fine for a 30-minute comedy, where the crisis is the focus. In the case of an hour-long character drama, it feels gimmicky — yet another example of why the in media res intro needs to be put in filmmaking jail for a decade.
The problem at the heart of the story is that adult son Ansh (Mihir Ahuja) — who works in Norway as an engineer and hasn’t been home in three years — bought his family a fancy apartment in the city six months ago, without asking if they wanted it. His family — which consists of dad Goggi (Manoj Pahwa), mom Sukhi (Neelu Kohli), and 14-year-old sister Mahi (Aurra Bhatnagar Badoni) — hate the unfriendly neighbors in the soulless building. They continue to live in the old family house nearby but gather in the kitchen of the new apartment when Ansh calls via FaceTime, pretending that they reside there.
When Ansh announces that he’s coming home in a few days for Diwali, the family scramble to make the apartment look lived in (they do a terrible job of this, by the way). It gets worse when Ansh tells the family that he’s hired caterers for a Diwali party so that he can meet all of their new friends from the building, all of whom are elaborate fictions created by the family to support the lie that they live there.
This really is a good comic setup for a short sitcom episode where getting out of the jam is the focus. But when writer Ritu Mago — who was much more successful with 2025’s Diwali family short film Greater Kalesh — expands the premise beyond sitcom length, the flaws become apparent.
The level of deceit by Goggi, Sukhi, and Mahi is staggering. They’ve spent six months lying to Ansh, with no intention of ever telling him the truth. The apartment is expensive, and it seems wasteful to leave it sitting unused most of the time.
Ansh isn’t without fault. In fact, he’s the reason the film becomes downright depressing to watch. Turns out that, since childhood, Ansh has felt ashamed that his parents couldn’t afford a nicer home. He became an engineer specifically to earn the money to buy them someplace fancy, not out of altruism but embarrassment. He doesn’t intend to live there with them, and there’s no one he’s trying to impress. He just can’t stand the fact that they present as working class.
It gets worse when it’s revealed that Ansh can’t actually afford the apartment, and his solution to pay off the loan is reprehensible.
The longer the story gets, the more dysfunctional the Sikka family seems, and the less convincing the obligatory happy ending becomes. Everyone is miserable for much of the film.
There’s also a weirdness to Dilwali Diwali‘s dialogue as read via English subtitles. I don’t know if that’s because of subtitler Sheela Sijin Mathews’s translation or Mago’s writing, but the dialogue doesn’t flow naturally. It just adds to the feeling of disorientation in a film billed as a sweet family entertainer that is anything but.
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