Param Sundari (2025) Movie Review: Janhvi Kapoor & Sidharth Malhotra’s cross-cultural rom-com is dead on arrival

At its core, “Param Sundari” is about the current generation’s obsession with data-driven results as opposed to trusting their genuine, unfiltered feelings. Director Tushar Jalota, who is holding the north end of the stick here, is not against the idea that an old-school romance can have an algorithm-based twist. However, his ideas are spread across such nonsensically designed gags, cultural appropriation cushioning, and the idea of the South so vehemently surface-level that the result keeps hitting cache memory. 

Now, Janhvi Kapoor & Sidharth Malhotra are both good-looking people. Jalota and team thus take the plunge here of putting them in a rom-com that is literally just interested in showcasing their perfectly toned bodies. The gaze is so sultry towards both stars that, at some point, I found myself wishing that the film, at least, committed to it. Instead, we get a story so unevenly spread across slapstick humor and cheesy meet-cutes that the only redeeming quality left is Sonu Nigam hitting a high note. 

Cross-cultural romance is not a new thing in Bollywood. However, “Param Sundari” is adamant in claiming that it’s the only one that is doing it right. The proceedings kick off in the North with Param (Sidharth Malhotra) sculpted around the startup-dudebros with a whole lot of baap-ka-paisa. He is one of those men who have so much money lying around that they are literally hungry for a good idea for them to invest in. Basically, he is a talking and walking wall with little to no depth to his character, and there’s no one better than Malhotra to play him. 

Anyway, he is approached to invest in an app that matches bodily frequencies (Umm…what?) to decide if two people are a 100% match – making them their soulmates. Since Param’s daddy is no longer interested in funding his son’s rally of startup failures, Param decides to beta-test the app on himself. The match delivers him and his long-time best friend Jaggy (Manjot Singh) to a small, picturesque town in Alleppey, with the south end of the stick being in Sundari’s (Janhvi Kapoor) hands. 

Sundari runs a homestay with her younger sister, played by the amazing young actor Inayat Verma. After her mom and dad passed away, Sundari has been handling her home, running a business, clearing out property buyers, and waltzing around the house, teaching  Mohiniyattam – the only thing that keeps her going. When Param walks into her life, she is least interested – she even finds him irritating. Although there are endearing qualities in him that do change her outlook towards him, eventually. 

Now, once the setting is established, “Param Sundari” does very little to actually build this romance from ground zero. Param and Sundari were introduced as characters developed only on the basis of their traits rather than feelings, and director Jalota and co-writers Gaurav Mishra and Aarsh Vora do nothing at all to make them feel like humans that we should care about. This is the reason why this cross-cultural rom-com feels dead on arrival. If anyone from the team knew that flaws are inherent in any person and the society that they are a part of, they would have replaced the aforementioned gags with real moments of catharsis. The patriarchy that Sundari was brought up around, or the privileged and empty one that Param belongs to, is never a part of the grander arch, making everything else about them feel irredeemable and vapid. 

The typecasting and/or offensive stereotypes might not be present in “Param Sundari,” but it still feels like it uses placeholders to look and sound better. The first thing Param and Jaggy encounter in Kerala is a taxi driver who is day-drinking local liquor. There’s also a young nurse who sexualizes Param and wants to do a full-body check-up on him. We get a third wheel so wooden and without personality that you wish the makers had chosen to be offensive instead. 

To top that off, none of the performances stand out, and even though the film is shot in beautiful locations, the after-effect of this loud, soulless romance is mostly flat. The lack of emotionally involving conflict, over-reliance on the North-South angle, and lackluster writing derail this cheerful romance by stifling its own colorful gaze. 

Read More: Meenakshi Sundareshwar [2021] Netflix Review: A Sweet Film Affected By Its Affection To Sweetness

Param Sundari (2025) Movie Links: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd, Wikipedia
Param Sundari (2025) Movie Cast: Sidharth Malhotra, Janhvi Kapoor, Manjot Singh, Sanjay Kapoor, Inayat Verma, Renji Panicker

Where to watch Param Sundari