CAST: Huma Qureshi, Sunny Singh, Shreyas Talpade, Kanwaljit Singh, Asif Khan, Navni Parihar, Nidhi Singh
DIRECTOR: Nachiket Samant
GENRE: Comedy, Romance, Drama
DURATION: 2 hours 21 minutes
STARS: 2.5
Nachiket Samant’s Single Salma walks into the theatre with a heart full of good intentions — it wants to speak about choice, agency, and the quiet suffocation that comes with being a single woman in her 30s in India. It wants to question how “liberation” is defined for women, and who gets to decide it. But for all its noble ambition, the film struggles to find a consistent rhythm between being a grounded character study and a dramatic love triangle.
Set in Lucknow, the story revolves around Salma Rizvi (Huma Qureshi), a talented urban planner, dependable daughter, and reluctant bride-to-be. Salma is the kind of woman who keeps everyone else’s world spinning while quietly neglecting her own desires. Her fiancé, Sikandar (Shreyas Talpade), is kind, stable, and unthreatening the sort of man who fits perfectly into the template her family imagines for her. When a work trip takes Salma to London, her perfectly organized life begins to unravel in unexpected ways.
In London, she meets Meet Singh (Sunny Singh), a confident, free-spirited planner who doesn’t believe in the rules that have long defined Salma’s world. What begins as professional camaraderie slowly morphs into attraction and, eventually, a complicated relationship that challenges everything she thought she knew about love, commitment, and herself. When she returns to Lucknow, she finds herself torn not between two men, but between two versions of herself, the woman society expects her to be and the woman she’s slowly discovering she wants to become.
The first half of Single Salma is its strongest. Samant paints Lucknow with a refreshing eye, the government office scenes feel lived-in, and Salma’s domestic life is captured with a tender realism. Her mother’s quiet empathy and her friend’s unapologetic pragmatism add emotional depth to the narrative. There’s a sense of calm observation in how Salma’s daily grind unfolds — chai breaks, family arguments, and the invisible weight of responsibility.
It’s in the second half, however, that the film begins to lose its footing. What could have been an introspective journey of self-discovery becomes muddled in melodrama and mixed messaging. The idea that Salma “finds herself” through a man — and one who lectures her on freedom — feels dated and lazy. The narrative starts treating liberation as an accessory rather than an internal evolution. Even a potentially powerful moment, where Salma faces online shaming after private photos are leaked, is handled with uneven emotional weight. The film wants to be empowering, but it often ends up explaining empowerment instead of letting it emerge naturally.
Huma Qureshi is the film’s emotional anchor. She plays Salma with grace and complexity, allowing her vulnerability to coexist with quiet resilience. Even when the script falters, her performance keeps the film believable. Shreyas Talpade delivers a surprisingly restrained performance — his Sikandar is warm, slightly awkward, and genuinely likeable. Sunny Singh, on the other hand, feels miscast. His Meet is charming on the surface, but his emotional transitions never quite land, making the central conflict feel shallow.
Technically, Single Salma is competent but uninspired. Sohail Sen’s music doesn’t add much to the mood, and the editing could have been tighter — especially in the meandering second act. Andrew Boulter’s cinematography occasionally captures striking contrasts between the textured chaos of Lucknow and the glossy openness of London, but these visuals serve as decoration rather than commentary.
Where the film succeeds is in its intent. It wants to see women beyond the binaries of “modern” and “traditional,” “bold” and “obedient.” It wants to ask: what does being “single” mean in a society that defines women by their relationships? But these questions deserve a sharper, more daring script than what Single Salma delivers.
Single Salma is a film that deserves credit for what it tries to say, even if it never quite figures out how to say it. Earnest and occasionally moving, it’s powered by Huma Qureshi’s sincerity but weighed down by inconsistent writing and a confused gaze. It’s not a bad film just one that mistakes good intentions for good storytelling.
A heartfelt, uneven, and well-meaning exploration of womanhood that needed more courage and less clutter to truly shine.