By Team INVC | INVC NEWS
MUMBAI, India | October 2, 2026 —
Rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)
A romantic comedy does not need a revolutionary story to work. It needs chemistry that feels effortless, characters worth rooting for, and humor that lands without looking desperate for a laugh.
“Prem Keetanu” has almost all the ingredients on paper. What it struggles to find is the spark.
Veer Pahariya and Aafiya Sayed headline a youthful story built around love, friendship, career choices, family expectations, and the confusion that comes with figuring out what — and whom — you really want.
Directed by Apoorv Singh Karki, the film repeatedly tries to be charming, funny, and emotionally warm. There are moments when it gets close. But across its roughly 2-hour-and-18-minute runtime, the romance rarely becomes irresistible and the comedy never develops the rhythm needed to carry the film.
The result is a rom-com that is easy to watch in parts but surprisingly difficult to fall in love with.
THE 60-SECOND REVIEW
What works: Aafiya Sayed’s natural screen presence, a handful of warm family moments, an energetic supporting cast, and a few genuinely pleasant sequences.
What doesn’t: Uneven chemistry, predictable romantic beats, inconsistent comedy, a stretched screenplay, and emotional moments that do not hit hard enough.
Who may enjoy it: Viewers looking for a light, undemanding young-adult romance.
Biggest problem: “Prem Keetanu” promises both romance and comedy but struggles to make either one distinctive enough to define the movie.
INVC NEWS Rating: ★★☆☆☆ — 2/5
The Story: When Friendship, Love and Growing Up Collide
At its heart, “Prem Keetanu” explores a familiar stage of young adulthood — when friendship begins to look like attraction, attraction gets mistaken for love, and relationships collide with career choices and family expectations.
Veer Pahariya plays Vishal, the young man at the center of this emotional confusion.
Aafiya Sayed plays Suhani, whose presence pushes the story toward questions about love, independence, personal choices, and what people actually want from a relationship.
On paper, that is fertile territory for a warm coming-of-age romantic comedy.
The problem is not the premise.
It is what the movie does with it.
The Romance: Where Is the Spark?
A successful romance does not merely make audiences wonder whether two people will end up together.
It makes them care.
That emotional investment is where “Prem Keetanu” struggles.
Veer Pahariya and Aafiya Sayed share some easygoing moments, and visually, they make an appealing pair. But looking good together and generating unforgettable screen chemistry are very different achievements.
The movie never consistently reaches the second level.
Romantic scenes arrive, play out, and move the story forward, but too few of them create the emotional tension needed to make audiences genuinely invested in Vishal and Suhani’s relationship.
For a movie with “Prem” in its title, that becomes a serious problem.
The Comedy: Punchlines Arrive, Big Laughs Don’t
Then there is the comedy.
With performers such as Aparshakti Khurana, Rakesh Bedi, and Nikhil Vijay in the supporting cast, expectations naturally rise.
They do bring energy to the film.
A few one-liners work. Some situational humor produces smiles. The supporting characters occasionally inject exactly the liveliness the central story needs.
But the comic rhythm keeps breaking.
Several jokes can be anticipated before the punchline arrives. Other scenes feel constructed around getting a laugh rather than allowing humor to emerge naturally from the characters.
That difference matters.
When “Prem Keetanu” wants a big laugh, it too often settles for a mild smile.
Veer Pahariya: The Effort Is Visible, the Character Less Memorable
Veer Pahariya faces a difficult task with Vishal.
He has to make the character feel like more than another familiar Hindi-film romantic hero.
Pahariya keeps his performance relatively restrained. He works better in some of the lighter scenes, where his screen presence feels more relaxed. He also attempts to bring vulnerability into the emotional stretches.
Yet Vishal never receives a sufficiently strong character arc to become truly memorable.
The romantic portions demand more emotional vulnerability, while the comedy requires sharper timing. Pahariya does not maintain the same level of impact across both.
This is less a disastrous performance than a performance that never gets enough material — or momentum — to become compelling.
Aafiya Sayed Brings an Easy, Natural Presence
Aafiya Sayed brings a welcome naturalness to Suhani.
She avoids turning the character into an exaggerated romantic-comedy stereotype, and some of her restrained moments feel refreshingly unforced.
There is an ease to her screen presence that works in the movie’s favor.
However, the screenplay again becomes the limiting factor.
Had Suhani been given more narrative space, greater emotional complexity, and a stronger individual journey, she might have emerged as the movie’s defining character.
Instead, there are glimpses of what could have been.
The Real Problem Is Not the Story — It Is the Treatment
There is nothing inherently wrong with telling a familiar love story.
Romantic comedies have been recycling basic setups for decades. Some of the genre’s most beloved movies work precisely because they take familiar situations and make them feel fresh through characters, dialogue, chemistry, and emotional honesty.
That is where “Prem Keetanu” falls behind.
The movie wants to talk about first love, friendship, adulthood, careers, families, independence, and taking responsibility for your own choices.
Those are worthwhile ideas.
But by trying to hold on to so many emotional threads, the screenplay never grips one tightly enough to give the film a powerful identity of its own.
You recognize much of what is happening while watching it.
The bigger problem is how quickly much of it begins to fade from memory afterward.
The ‘Premalu’ Comparison Is Hard to Avoid
There is another challenge hanging over “Prem Keetanu.”
The film has been presented as an official Hindi adaptation of the 2024 Malayalam romantic-comedy hit “Premalu.”
That inevitably invites comparisons.
A remake cannot survive simply by transferring the central premise into another language or geographic setting. It has to understand what made the original connect and then rebuild that appeal for a different cultural and cinematic environment.
“Prem Keetanu” attempts to give the material its own North Indian flavor.
Still, it struggles to establish a sufficiently distinctive cinematic personality.
That leaves the movie caught between the familiarity of its source material and its attempt to become something new.
The 2-Hour-Plus Runtime Begins to Show
Pacing matters enormously in a romantic comedy.
When the romance is irresistible and the jokes keep landing, audiences rarely worry about the clock.
When neither consistently happens, every extra scene becomes more noticeable.
That is what happens here.
The middle portions could have benefited from tighter editing. Some sequences needed trimming, while a few crucial emotional moments arguably needed more room to breathe.
A leaner screenplay might have helped the romance move faster and the comedy hit harder.
Supporting Cast Offers Some Relief
The supporting performers frequently provide the movie with much-needed energy.
Aparshakti Khurana brings his familiar ease to the lighter portions. Rakesh Bedi adds warmth, while Nikhil Vijay contributes to some of the movie’s more relaxed comic moments.
The music also tries to maintain the film’s youthful, contemporary mood.
Yet neither the supporting cast nor the soundtrack can completely compensate for a central romance that never becomes emotionally irresistible.
INVC NEWS VERDICT
“Prem Keetanu” is not a movie built around a bad idea. It is a movie that never fully realizes several potentially good ones.
There is young love. There is friendship. There are family dynamics, career anxieties, and questions about growing up and making independent choices.
But the romance stops short of becoming emotionally absorbing, while the comedy struggles to deliver sustained laughs.
Veer Pahariya puts in the effort. Aafiya Sayed brings a natural quality to her debut. The supporting cast helps lift several scenes.
What the movie lacks is the screenplay, pace, and irresistible chemistry needed to turn a familiar love story into a memorable romantic comedy.
If you simply want a light young-adult romance and enter without major expectations, “Prem Keetanu” may offer enough pleasant moments for a casual watch.
But if you are looking for the kind of rom-com whose characters, jokes, and love story follow you out of the theater, this one may leave you wanting considerably more.
INVC NEWS Rating: ★★☆☆☆ — 2/5
Bottom Line: The love bug is in the title. Unfortunately, its bite never quite reaches the audience.
