Param Sundari - Dimag Ka Coconut Khaali

Param Sundari

Hindi - Comedy / Drama
150 mins
Prime Video

 

There are bad films, and then there are films like Param Sundari — a Frankenstein’s monster of Bollywood rom-coms past. I was under no illusion, of course. Sometimes I watch these really bad movies — more like a “hit me” dolls when I need to de-stress.

It’s 2025, so Sidharth Malhotra stars as Param whatever, a good-for-nothing rich guy who blows money on startup ideas that never materialize. A Bollywood textbook Dilli wala Punjabi munda, the left-right-center Tinder swiper, the “OnlyFans”, oops only for fans body builder types, and the loud papaji (Sanjay Kapoor) always chiding him.

He is pitched an app that is “beyond Tinder and Shaadi.com” - some BS about matching frequency, chemistry, wavelength and soul !!

Param signs up and is recommended to a village in Kerela (not one person spells this correctly in the entire movie!). So Param and his sidekick (Manjot Singh, who clearly got lucky since Varun Sharma and Namit Das weren’t available 😂) head out to this village and meet the homestay owner, Sundari (Janhvi Kapoor).

What follows is a bit of DDLJ, Chennai Express (ok for the time), Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania (a responsible woman) tossed into a protein shake blender with a splash of coconut water. Voilà — we have this glossy bovine excreta that somehow got made.

I have absolutely no clue why a director who showed great promise with Dasvi (Tushar Jalota) would sign up for this.

Sidharth Malhotra has been around for 13 years now. A quick look at his filmography makes it abundantly clear that Shershaah was an aberration — the film worked more for Captain Vikram Batra’s story (and those hauntingly good songs) than for Malhotra’s acting. He is painfully bad — charisma-free, expressionless, so bland he could blend into his own smoothie and we would not notice.

His dancing? As mechanical as ever. You can practically hear the choreographer counting in the background — “One-two… lets go!” He has the wooden grace of a chopping board — even a 13-year-old wooden ladle would bring more life to a kitchen scene.

Then there’s Janhvi Kapoor. Every outfit looks like it was designed by someone obsessed who googled Zaftig (Google it). Forget authenticity — I doubt any woman, anywhere in India, dresses like this in real life, let alone someone from a small-town Kerala family. The blouses are so tightly tailored you start wondering if they had backups between takes in case one simply gave up mid-scene. Clearly, someone went full KJo on this one.

If the team genuinely wanted to get the tone right, a Nithya Menen or Nazriya Nazim could have easily carried the part with charm and nativity. But no — Bollywood’s obsession with high-gloss “beauty” over believable character persists. Janhavi’s attempt at speaking Malayalam is its own comedy track — the rolled tongue and twisted syllables so exaggerated, even speakers would need subtitles. Ever heard of dialect coaches?

The supporting cast is no better. Abhishek Banerjee pops in as the "Soulmate" app pitcher,  one-day shoot, a solid paycheck — good for him. Sanjay Kapoor as the father is loud and hammy. Renji Panicker, why sir?. The rest of the ensemble is made up of caricatures: a Malayali nurse who insists on giving the hero a “body exam,” sidekicks who are perpetually drunk.

And about that writing. There is one line that truly sums up the whole experience:

“DIMAAG KA COCONUT KHALI HO GAYA AUR DIL TODDY PE KE NAACH RAHA HAI.”

That, dear reader, is not only a line from the film — it’s also what happens to your brain while watching it.

The songs? Straight out of the reheated leftovers section. There’s one number, Laal Rang Ki Saari,  a desperate nod to Kala Chashma — only credit being that Sidharth Malhotra featured in both, but no Katrina Kaif to save him this time.  Every track feels like a recycled remix that even Tanishk Bagchi would’ve politely declined — Sonu Nigam’s voice notwithstanding.

It’s the same arrogance I saw in War 2 — that lazy confidence that “good-looking,” Instagram-friendly stars, exotic locales, and glossy camera filters can replace soul. The result is a rom-com so hollow it could echo in an empty multiplex.

Speaking of which — Dinesh Vijan’s Maddock Films, recently accused of creative accounting, may have just added another chapter to that theory. The reported ₹60 crore “collection” feels suspiciously generous. If you looked up the movie on IMDB - the 5.4 is  clearly Dino's bots at work.

Param Sundari feels like it was directed by an algorithm trained on the worst clichés of Bollywood romance circa 2010. The acting is uniformly bad, the writing lazy and the emotions are synthetic.

By the end, you are left wondering not just who this movie was made for, but how anyone actually sat through it in cinemas. If there is  one lesson here, it’s that nostalgia has an expiry date — and Param Sundari missed it by at least a decade.

Given the utter disdain towards the cinematic craft, maybe it was all a clever write-off exercise against Chhava’s success or the “Horror Universe.” Either way, numbers don’t lie — but someone’s Excel sheet sure does. Maybe it was an accounting exercise after all.