The Vvaan Review Verdict: Vvaan had one job: make a sincere film centred on Chhath Puja, a festival that has genuinely never been given proper cinematic treatment, and somehow turned it into an Ekta Kapoor serial wearing a big-budget film’s clothing. What should have been devotional and rooted becomes a scattershot mess of item numbers, cringe comedy, aggressive product placement, and CGI so overworked it looks like it gave up halfway through. I watched this expecting reverence. I got a coconut thrown directly at my expectations.
Vvaan is currently in theatrical release. This review is based on a theatrical viewing. Runtime and certification details as listed by the distributor at release.
Quick Verdict: Is Vvaan Worth Watching?
Honestly, no, unless you are going purely out of curiosity about how badly a film with real resources can misjudge its own subject. I will say clearly and in writing: the intent behind this film seems to have gotten lost somewhere between the pitch meeting and the shoot.
What could have been a sincere, moving film about Chhath Puja, a subject genuinely deserving of cinematic devotion, becomes something that plays more like a serial than a film, complete with the comedic ensemble, the loud background music, and the aggressive brand integration that defines that specific genre of content.
If you are going purely for the name of the festival, for nostalgia, or simply as a time-pass outing, you can go. But go with your expectations fully recalibrated. Do not go expecting reverence for the subject matter. You will not find it here.
Vvaan (2026) — Movie Info
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Title | Vvaan |
| Lead Cast | Sidharth Malhotra, Tamannaah Bhatia |
| Supporting Cast | Anup Soni, Manish Paul, Sunil Pal, Shweta Tiwari |
| Genre | Drama (marketed) / Comedy-adjacent chaos (in execution) |
| Central Theme | Chhath Puja devotion |
| Setting | Meant to be Bihar; visually resembles an idealised, overproduced Western-adjacent location |
| Our Rating | ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5) |
Vvaan Cast — Full Lineup
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Sidharth Malhotra | Lead — a man attempting to prove his devotion |
| Tamannaah Bhatia | Female lead |
| Anup Soni | Comic relief — acting itself becomes a crime scene |
| Manish Paul | Comic relief — a blogger character |
| Sunil Pal | Comic relief |
| Shweta Tiwari | Supporting — the film’s least cringe-inducing comedic presence |
| Unnamed grandmother character | Comic relief — reach for a pillow; you will need it |
What Is Vvaan About?
The premise, on paper, is genuinely exciting: a film built around Chhath Puja, a festival that, despite its massive cultural and emotional significance across Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, has almost never received serious cinematic treatment in Hindi film. That is a real gap in Indian cinema, and a film that filled it with sincerity and craft could have been something genuinely special.
Vvaan opens with the right intention. It begins with devotion. And then, almost immediately, it forgets what it set out to do. Sidharth Malhotra’s character makes an entrance, driving a JCB, in a stylised, overproduced sequence that has nothing to do with the quiet reverence the opening promised. From there, the film seems to lose track of its own subject entirely.
A romantic song arrives because it is apparently the weekend within the story. An item number arrives because, well, it is unclear why, except that someone decided the film needed one. A comedy ensemble arrives and stays for what feels like the rest of the runtime.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this, there is technically a plot. I could not tell you with confidence what it was building toward, because the film itself does not seem especially interested in building toward anything. It moves from set piece to set piece with the internal logic of a serial episode structure rather than a film screenplay.
Vvaan Review: Where the Film Loses the Plot (Literally)
The Tonal Collision
The fundamental problem with Vvaan is that it cannot decide what film it wants to be, and it tries to be several films simultaneously without any of them working together. It wants to be a devotional drama about Chhath Puja. It wants to be a big commercial entertainer with songs and dance numbers.
It wants to be a broad ensemble comedy in the style of a television serial. It wants to be a romance between its two leads. Each of these individually is a valid film to make. All four crammed into one runtime, competing for space and tonal control, produce something that never settles into a coherent identity.
The most jarring instinct in the film is the decision to relocate its emotional and visual register away from the rootedness the subject demands. If you are making a film about Chhath Puja set in Bihar, you should be leaning into the texture and specificity of that setting — the riverbank, the community, the quiet intensity of the ritual itself.
Instead, the film aims for something glossier and more generically aspirational, as though someone in a production meeting suggested making the setting feel more like an idealised, filtered version of somewhere else entirely, dressed up rather than lived in.
The Comedy Ensemble Problem
I need to talk about the comedic cast because their combined presence is the single biggest tonal betrayal of the film’s stated subject matter.
Anup Soni’s performance in this film is something to witness, not for the reasons a performance normally earns attention. Manish Paul plays a blogger character whose comic timing produces the opposite of laughter. Sunil Pal contributes to an ensemble that, when assembled together on screen, does not just make the film loud; it takes on its own chaotic rhythm entirely disconnected from everything around it.
There is a grandmother character whose comedic material is delivered with such insistence that you will find yourself reaching for something to muffle your reaction, whether that reaction is laughter of the wrong kind or simple discomfort.
Shweta Tiwari, to her credit, has better timing than most of the ensemble around her, and seems to intuitively locate the moments where the cringe is thinnest and contribute there. It is not much of a compliment given the company, but it is a real one.
The dialogue given to this ensemble does not help. There is a line about applying balm for a headache that is delivered with the confidence of something the writers believed was genuinely funny. It is the kind of joke that makes you lose a little faith in the state of comedy writing in mainstream Hindi cinema.
Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia
I want to be fair here, because the two leads are working with material that does not serve them well. Sidharth Malhotra’s performance in Vvaan is not a highlight of his career; there is a specific quality to it that feels more suited to television drama than feature film acting, and I mean that as a genuine critique of the register he has been asked to work in rather than a dismissal of his abilities generally.
The chemistry between Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia is watchable in isolated moments; there is a natural ease between them on screen, but the surrounding material does not give that chemistry anywhere meaningful to go.
The Product Placement Problem
This film’s commitment to product placement deserves its own paragraph because of how conspicuous it becomes. Brand integrations appear throughout with a frequency and lack of subtlety that actively pull you out of scenes. A skincare product appears prominently enough that its placement timing becomes a running joke you did not sign up to notice.
A digestive remedy brand gets a dedicated moment of dialogue that has nothing to do with the scene’s actual content. By the midpoint of the film, spotting the next brand integration becomes a more engaging activity than following the plot.
The Background Score
The music in this film deserves specific mention for being aggressively, distractingly generic. It has the quality of stock production music assembled without much consideration for the specific scenes it accompanies, present in nearly every moment, rarely calibrated to what is actually happening on screen, and occasionally almost comedic in how mismatched it feels to the emotional register the scene is reaching for.
The Visual Style — Over-Filtered, Over-Processed
The cinematography and colour grading throughout Vvaan have a heavily processed, filtered quality that undermines the film’s claim to rootedness at every turn. Locations that should feel real and lived-in instead have the quality of an overworked social media filter applied indiscriminately across the runtime.
Even scenes that could have worked as straightforward, grounded moments are visually dressed up to the point where they read as artificial rather than authentic.
The VFX and CGI work compounds this problem. There are visual effects throughout the film that feel under-executed relative to the scale the production is clearly aiming for, the kind of CGI that draws attention to itself rather than disappearing into the story.
Vvaan vs. Hanu-Man: The Comparison the Film Cannot Escape
I keep coming back to this comparison because it is instructive and because the film itself, through its choices, invites it.
Hanu-Man was made on a reported budget of approximately ₹2 crore. No major stars. No significant marketing machine behind it initially. And it went on to earn well over ₹350 crore through pure word of mouth, built entirely on sincerity, craft, and staying rooted to its subject matter without straying into unnecessary embellishment.
Kantara and Karthikeya 2 achieved similar results through similar discipline, trusting the subject, trusting the audience, and resisting the urge to dress a simple, resonant story up in more than it needs.
Vvaan has Sidharth Malhotra, an actor with genuine mainstream recognition and box office pull. It has significant production resources behind it. And it squanders both by refusing to trust its own subject matter.
If the makers had handed creative control fully to a team with a rooted, grounded sensibility, the kind of instinct you see in web content built for authenticity rather than spectacle, this could have been the film Hanu-Man was: modest, sincere, and enormously successful because of that sincerity rather than despite it.
Instead, Vvaan seems to have calculated that the Chhath Puja name alone would guarantee an audience from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh regardless of quality, and built accordingly, betting on the festival’s emotional pull to cover for a film that does very little to earn that pull on its own merits.
Is Vvaan Worth Watching for the Chhath Puja Angle Alone?
This is the most disappointing part of my experience with this film, and I want to be direct about it. If you are going specifically hoping for a genuine, moving portrayal of Chhath Puja and what it means to the people who observe it, you will not find that here in any sustained way. The devotional elements that open the film are not developed with the depth or respect the subject deserves. They are treated as a marketing hook rather than the actual heart of the story.
That is the real betrayal at the centre of Vvaan. It is not simply that the film is poorly made; plenty of poorly made films exist and mostly just disappoint on craft terms. It is that this film had access to a genuinely underserved and emotionally rich subject, and chose spectacle, comedy ensemble chaos, and brand integration over the sincerity that subject deserved.
Pros and Cons
✓ Pros
- The core subject — Chhath Puja — is a genuinely underexplored and emotionally rich area for Hindi cinema to have tackled
- Chemistry between Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia is watchable in isolated moments
- Shweta Tiwari’s comedic timing is a relative bright spot in an otherwise chaotic ensemble
- The climax’s devotional song sequence has surface appeal, even if it reads as calculated rather than earned
✗ Cons
- Tonal chaos: the film cannot commit to being devotional drama, commercial entertainer, comedy, or romance
- Comedy ensemble (Anup Soni, Manish Paul, Sunil Pal) produces consistent cringe rather than laughter
- Aggressive, conspicuous product placement throughout
- Background score is generic and frequently mismatched to scenes
- Over-filtered, over-processed visual style undermines the story’s claim to authenticity
- CGI and VFX work is under-executed for the scale the production is aiming at
- The devotional heart of the story is treated as marketing rather than genuine content
- Squanders a genuinely rich, underexplored subject in favour of formula
Final Verdict
| Category | Score |
|---|---|
| Direction / Tonal Control | ★☆☆☆☆ |
| Screenplay | ★☆☆☆☆ |
| Sidharth Malhotra & Tamannaah Bhatia Chemistry | ★★★☆☆ |
| Comedy Ensemble | ★☆☆☆☆ |
| Music / BGM | ★☆☆☆☆ |
| Cinematography / Visual Style | ★★☆☆☆ |
| VFX / CGI | ★☆☆☆☆ |
| Treatment of Subject Matter | ★☆☆☆☆ |
| Overall | ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5) |
Vvaan will likely make money. I will say that in writing, because the makers clearly understood that a Chhath Puja-branded film would draw an audience from the communities for whom this festival is deeply meaningful, regardless of what the film actually delivers. That commercial calculation may well pay off. It does not make the film good, and it does not excuse what the film does with a subject that deserved genuine care.
If your intent going in is prayer and reverence, this film will hand you a coconut to the head instead. If good intent had driven this production the way it drove Hanu-Man, Kantara, or Karthikeya 2, even a fraction of this budget could have produced something genuinely moving. Instead, Vvaan chose spectacle over sincerity, and the subject, and the audience who came specifically for it, deserved better.
It doesn’t quite carry the weight its title promises, but I had a good time with it, and I’m curious what this director does next. If you’re deciding which movie to watch next, explore our latest reviews of Daayra Review, Vibe Review, Primetime Review, The Dog Stars Review, Heart of the Beast Review, The Paradise Review, and Irumudi Review.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Vvaan movie about?
Vvaan is a Hindi film centred nominally around Chhath Puja, starring Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia. It follows a character attempting to prove his devotion, but the film quickly diverges from its devotional premise into a mix of romance, comedy ensemble chaos, and commercial song-and-dance sequences.
Where can I watch Vvaan?
Vvaan is currently in theatrical release. Check local listings for showtimes. A streaming or OTT release date has not been confirmed at the time of this review.
What movie are Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia starring in together?
Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia star together in Vvaan, a 2026 Hindi film built around the Chhath Puja festival, released with significant marketing centred on the festival’s cultural significance.
Is Vvaan worth watching for the Chhath Puja theme?
Not particularly. Despite marketing heavily around the festival, the film treats its devotional subject matter superficially, prioritising comedy, romance, and commercial elements over a genuine or sustained exploration of Chhath Puja itself.
Is Vvaan a good film overall?
No. The film suffers from significant tonal inconsistency, an overbearing and unfunny comedy ensemble, aggressive product placement, generic music, and an over-processed visual style. Our rating: 1 out of 5.
Vvaan is currently in theatrical release.
