Tiku Weds Sheru review: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Avneet Kaur’s cringe fest is neither funny nor engaging

Tiku and Sheru are not meant for each other yet they end up together. Sai Kabir’s directorial, Tiku weds Sheru is anything but a family entertainer. For it to be called a romantic drama with dark satire… there’s zero romance or clever humour, and it is only melodrama that tortures you for nearly two hours. Merely twenty minutes into the film, and it starts to get on your nerves. It pains me to see an actor of Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s calibre doing a film this crass and lame. As Sheru, he’s an unfunny man expected to do funny things. Though he’s sincere and diligent in whatever he does, as audience, you pity seeing him in such parts.

And don’t even get me started on Avneet Kaur. There’s nothing about her that works. Neither her jarring screen presence nor her dialogue delivery that’s more like lines said during rehearsal. Her overacting is tough to bear at times. She is raw and real but never really convinces you with her performance. Together, as a couple on screen, both look extremely odd and awkward. A scene where Sheru and Tiku go out for dinner for the first time, we see Tiku dressed as a cabaret dancer in a red flashy outfit. They eat, crack jokes, and go to take a stroll at a beach and end up kissing. With no beauty, no chemistry and no sparks whatsoever, the whole sequence, which could have been the high point of their relationships, looks half-hearted.

The story of Tiku Weds Sheru holds no novelty factor and appears to be a mixture of pieces picked from several scripts. Shiraz Khan Afghani aka Sheru (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is a junior artist and film financier in Mumbai, who gets married to Bhopal girl Tasleem aka Tiku (Avneet Kaur), an aspiring actor with dreams of becoming a superstar. While she agrees to marry Sheru as that’s the only way she can get to Mumbai and reunite with her boyfriend Binni (Rahoul), she is least prepared for the twist that’s going to turn her life upside down. On the other hand, when Sheru learns that he was tricked into trap, how he comes to term with it and how their love story begins is an altogether different story that unfolds.

On the face of it, both these eccentric, loud and melodramatic characters are simple people, but the murky things they eventually get involved in take their journeys on different paths. Tiku Weds Sheru is a satire on those countless struggling artistes who come to this city to earn name and fame, but end up charting a course that makes them have self-realizations.

But Tiku Weds Sheru is cringe to its core. You feel no emotions even when a character is laughing loud or crying inconsolably. It all looks so superficial and never strikes a chord or hits you hard. Even the most serious scenes or intense exchange of dialogues fail to keep you invested. There are portions when we see a Tiku’s brother beating her with a belt while her parents and sister stand outside, helpless. This scene should have evoked so much anger, but it’s the least impactful. Another scene when she is leaving her house after marriage, her uncle uses cuss words for her, but instead of making you think and question this behaviour in such families, it annoys you for the way it has been shot.

Sai Kabir’s story that he has co-written with Amit Tiwari digresses from one point to another, and doesn’t really stick to one aspect for long. There are issues like misogyny, patriarchy, dowry, domestic violence and sexual abuse that the film touches upon, but it terribly fails to delve deeper into any of these. Even mensuration gets a mention as ‘periods’ or ‘down’ but it’s never meant to have any meaning attached to it.

Forget the scenes, the dialogues in the film are even more blah, and unfortunately, Nawaz gets to mouth most of them. Nawaz tells a man on set who tells him to not overact: ‘Main jo bhi karta hoon shiddat ke sath karta hoon and it’s a fact’. Nawaz fantasising looking at a picture of a girl: ‘Kitni delicious ho tum, kitna jolly hoon main, yeh galat hai ki hum dono marr jayenge’. Nawaz talking to his cat Elizabeth, ‘You are irritating me like a fly, not butterfly, like a house fly.’ A broken Nawaz to himself: ‘Sheru hai tu, sher ki tarah dahaad’.

By the way, Sheru also works as a pimp in his free time and trades girls to the rich and wealthy, besides being involved in drug business to generate funds. In his first scene in this role, he takes three women to Gulati Sahab, who is comfortably seated on a chair with his paunch resting on his thighs as he enjoys his drink. The scene doesn’t even merit to be in the film, or if the makers really wanted, it could have been written and shot better. At one point, Sheru expresses he wishes to focus on his career, and leave this ‘dalaali’ but he has immersed himself in the dirty business too far to come back from it.

How Tiku and Sheru, despite being two contrasting yet somewhat similar personalities stand by each other through thick and thin and how their starkly different stories meet a common fate, is what the film offers. Watch it if you seriously don’t have anything better to do this weekend, or if you like to watch cringe content, only to be able to appreciate better stuff. Tiku Weds Sheru is now streaming on Prime Video.