With Ahaan Panday's 'Saiyaara', Has Gen-Z Finally Found Its Own Love Story?

In an era dominated by OTT and streaming - where the urgency of going to the cinema has all but faded - thousands flocked to theatres , caught in the hype of what can only be described as the 'Saiyaara effect'. Suddenly, that communal magic long lost to our pocket-sized screens feels alive again.

And it isn't driven solely by spectacle. Unlike the action-packed blockbusters that have recently dominated the box office - full of hypermasculine heroes smashing buildings and 'bad guys' - Saiyaara offers something starkly different: a return to stories of love , loss, and longing. In many ways, marking the revival of simple romantic stories with layered emotions, music that tugs at the soul, and performances that feel honest. If you listed these ingredients back in the early 2000s, you'd be describing a Bollywood staple. But in 2025, it somehow felt like we were asking for too much.

Enter Saiyaara: a film that, at its core, remains a timeless tale of heartbreak - carried by young, beating hearts - but without ever trying to brand itself as a 'Gen-Z romance'. It doesn't promise a 'new-age' love story, but instead offers an age-old one, simply told through the emotional lens of a generation that's never truly found itself in stories of love and heartbreak.

This generation never had its DDLJ, Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai, Veer Zaara. Or even its Aashiqui. Sure, we can go back and watch those classics with all the fondness in the world, but they'll always be from a time before ours - experienced as borrowed nostalgia.

Then came Saiyaara, offering not a replication of those romances, which have been tried, tested, and failed, but an echo of the emotions we once felt when Raj rallied for Simran in DDLJ, or when Aman let go of Naina in Kal Ho Naa Ho, all set in a world that feels our own.

A new love language for an evergreen emotion

Off-late, we've seen a whole crop of films and shows trying to capture Gen-Z romance - Naadaniyaan, Loveyapa, Feels Like Ishq, Ishq Vishk Rebound, and many other names that I cannot even frankly begin to remember without a strenuous Google search. While many of these try to package youth through aesthetics, quirky meet-cutes, and Gen-Z slang, they rarely scratch beneath the surface.

Love, in these stories, is more a 'vibe' than a feeling. Something that happens on dating apps and in DMs, but not in flesh and bone... the butterflies of a first meeting or the punch in the gut after a breakup. They explore the beginning of love, but rarely its heartbreak - and even more rarely, the weight of when the heart breaks.

Which is where Saiyaara flips the script. It gets real with you. The reality of falling in love is hardly ever like the movies - and Gen-Z, being emotionally and intellectually clued in, has figured that out. You can't sway us with the La La Land version of romance because we won't buy it. But to assume this generation has given up on love entirely, even in the movies, is skipping a few too many steps ahead.

Hence, when Saiyaara offers unabashed love on a platter, we're bound to lap it up. But more importantly, it serves love with a side of emotional realism, not fantasy. This isn't a fantastical tale of lovers overcoming external odds like in DDLJ, it's about young people struggling with their own inner demons: unspoken silences, fractured relationships, emotional pain.

We see it in the way Vaani Batra (played by Aneet Padda) shuts down emotionally after being dumped on her wedding day, unable to even express her grief to herself, let alone her parents. We see it in Ahaan Panday's Krish Kapoor, who self-sabotages, lashes out, hurts the very people trying to love him. Their connection flickers in and out, with distance, and without, not because they're not invested, but because neither of them knows how to hold on to love while trying to heal themselves - an emotional conflict that defines much of the Gen-Z angst.

Mental health isn't treated as a side plot. Vaani spirals into clinical depression following her traumatic breakup. In earlier generations, this might not have been seen as plausible, but for an audience that has grown up acknowledging and experiencing mental health struggles, it feels raw and real. Krish wrestles with grief and simmering rage rooted in parental trauma - a reality many of us will know intimately.

Yet, Saiyaara never tries to educate us about mental health issues, it simply acknowledges its existence. Both Krish and Vaani allow us to sit with the mess, the breakdowns, the uncomfortable confusion and silences, in a way that feels familiar.

What most definitely adds to the film's impact is Ahaan Panday's dreamy debut, more impactful than anything we've seen in a long, long time. His honest eyes give this generation a humanised protagonist: someone flawed, bruised, but striving to evolve. From an emotionally unavailable 'red flag' with deep-rooted daddy issues to a man willing to sacrifice his rock-solid ego and identity for the woman he loves, Krish Kapoor hits that sweet spot between unhinged toxicity and performative wokeness.

“The film is about falling in love for the first time. You can't show someone in their 30s or 40s or 50s falling in love for the first time because then that's a whole different film,” Suri said in an interview, which also stands as a critical point of resonance.

In a cinematic landscape where older actors are routinely cast to play younger roles, Saiyaara's lead actors don't just look young, they are the generation they're representing on screen. They carry the emotional awkwardness and rawness of early adulthood. As Suri puts it,“Whether it's through texts, letters, or DMs, your heart still breaks the same way. You can swipe as much as you want, left or right, but the heart stays in the same place, somewhere to the centre-left. And that's going to stay the same for generations to come.” That, ultimately, is what Saiyaara understands.

And to anyone who thinks Gen-Z doesn't have the attention span beyond a viral audio track on Instagram Reels, well, perhaps it was because we've stopped finding melodies worth remembering. But Saiyaara's album soothes like completing the lyrics of the song you'd forgotten to sing.

It isn't perfect cinema. Nor does it reinvent the heartbreak genre. But as a cultural moment, it captures the yearning and the devastation of first love, at a time when Bollywood had forgotten how to do so, and in a way that also speaks directly to this generation.

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