Romancing Sydney (2025) Movie Review: A loosely bound rom-com that is unable to follow its uneven rhythms

Anmol Mishra’s “Romancing Sydney” silently pays tribute to Bollywood movies as characters, out of nowhere, move into dance routines. Of course, these are interludes used to accentuate what the characters are supposed to be feeling, but the fantasy sequences are so far removed and forced into the proceedings that – much like most of the film – they serve no purpose whatsoever. The result is a loosely bound rom-com that is unable to follow its uneven rhythms. 

The beginning of the film’s problems arrives in the form of sudden lateral shifts, convoluted turns that often lead to poorly staged sequences that fail at every conceivable level to express something that ties into the central themes of finding love and trying one’s best not to let it break. Before that happens, we are introduced to the central conceit – an antique shop on a not-so-busy corner in Sydney is run by Lilli (Gabrielle Chan), a feisty, often angry middle-aged Asian woman. George (Peter Hayes) and Sachin (director Anmol Mishra himself) work in the shop, but from the outset, they have widely different personalities from each other. 

While Sachin is this shy, awkward Indian man who has had no luck with girls all his life, his British co-worker George seems to be quite the lady’s man (or so he claims to be). Together, they just mess around in the antique shop, collecting and selling things while navigating the absence of any real connection in their lives. That is, until Sachin meets German dancer Elisa (Susanne Richter), who is suddenly kicked out of her home because her housemate told her to. This serendipitous meeting changes things for all 6 characters in “Romancing Sydney,” including Elisa’s dance partner Alex (Connor Dowling) and his boyfriend (and supposed fiancé) Zac (Brendon Wong). 

Now, the connectiveness of these 6 characters in no way serves any sort of grand purpose in the narrative, except inducing conflicts that twist their respective character arcs, but never organically manages to lead them to a conclusion. The convolution in the screenplay is so visible by the time the third act arrives that you can feel that the filmmaker has no idea what he wants to do with these characters. The only couple that made sense to me was George and Lily, and even they are abandoned midway through the film to bring an unfocused attention to the other two. 

It doesn’t help that the performances are substandard; Mishra himself plays Sachin with a slapstick-induced fervor that eventually lapses into a stilted outcome. The Looney Tunes-esque score never matches the beats of the humor that mostly falls flat, making it extremely tiring to sit through a whole bunch of nothing. To top that off, “Romancing Sydney” doesn’t seem to be in love or in hate with the city itself – you never get to grasp the foreground of these people who seem to daydream about dancing and loving, making it all the more difficult to give it the benefit of the doubt. 

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Romancing Sydney (2025) Movie Links: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes
Romancing Sydney (2025) Movie Cast: Anmol Mishra, Susanne Richter, Peter Hayes, Gabrielle Chan, Connor Downling, Brendon Wong