Karma: That legendary kiss and the rest of the show

Is it worth your time?

Look, if you are a film history nerd or just someone who likes seeing the cracks in the foundation of early cinema, sure. Dive in. If you are expecting a tight, modern narrative, you might want to skip this one. It feels like a beautiful, dusty museum exhibit that occasionally decides to get frisky.

Devika Rani and Himanshu Rai are the gravity here, pulling everything into their orbit. It’s an Orientalist fever dream, honestly. It feels like someone took a Hollywood blueprint from the same era—maybe something like Anna Karenina—and just painted it in vibrant, exotic colors to satisfy a very specific kind of audience back in the day.

That kiss.

Yes, that kiss. People talk about it like it’s the only reason this movie exists. It lasts forever. It’s awkward. It’s kind of funny watching them try to make it look natural while the camera just hangs there, paralyzed. It feels less like romance and more like a dare that went on for about thirty seconds too long.

The rest of the movie has this weird, stiff energy. It’s trying to be a sweeping epic, but it keeps tripping over its own feet. The sets look like they might fall over if someone sneezed too hard. There’s a theatricality to it that reminds me a bit of Aelita, the Queen of Mars, though with a lot less sci-fi and a lot more brooding.

• The dialogue is basically stage directions in fancy hats.
• The father’s disapproval is about as subtle as a brick through a window.
• I spent ten minutes trying to figure out if that was a real tiger or a very sad puppet.

It’s not a movie you watch for the plot, obviously. You watch it to see how they handled the transition between two very different worlds of storytelling. It feels like a collision. A messy, occasionally gorgeous, definitely uneven collision.

Some moments hit, and some just vanish into the ether. It lacks the punchy rhythm of something like Jungle Mystery, but it has a weird, stubborn soul. You can feel the effort in every frame, even when the frame is just two people staring intensely at a curtain.

Don’t go looking for deep psychological insight. It’s not here. Just enjoy the costumes and that legendary, uncomfortable kiss that everyone is still whispering about. 💋