Can true love heal our pessimistic hearts?
Jonathan Groff and Karan Soni sure hope it can in their new romantic comedy, A Nice Indian Boy.
On Mar. 5, the first trailer dropped for A Nice Indian Boy, a film that follows Naveen (Soni), an introverted doctor, who brings home Jay (Groff), his white fiancé, to meet his traditional Indian family for the first time. During this meeting, cultures clash, resulting in a series of “comic misunderstandings” and “emotional revelations” that might just lead to a happily ever after for the couple, wedding and all.
“A big wedding. A party with all the people we love. I want the same thing, with you,” Naveen says to a teary-eyed and smiling Jay.
Directed by Roshan Sethi and adapted to the screen by Eric Randall from Madhuri Shekar’s play, the film also stars Sunita Mani, Zarna Garg, Harish Patel, Peter S. Kim, and Sas Goldberg, with Mindy Kaling and Justin Baldoni as executive producers.
The film first premiered at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival to positive reviews, with critics describing it as a “heartfelt” look at the messiness that comes with love and how, despite all its frustrating complexities, love will always be worth it in the end.
“A Nice Indian Boy... isn’t afraid to let its pair of lovebirds seem fundamentally mismatched, and for a good chunk of its runtime to boot," Coleman Spilde wrote in his review for The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “That’s not an oversight in the film’s casting; its leads have chemistry, albeit some that takes a decent amount of time to dig up. Rather, it’s a testament to the movie’s reluctance to make life seem as neat and tidy as formulaic rom-coms suggest it can be... A Nice Indian Boy is filled with enough novel truth to transcend its predictable elements, leaving viewers with a film that feels like a genuine love story, instead of an idealistic imitation."
As Jay says to Naveen in the trailer, “I think a lot of people are a little embarrassed by the bigness of love.”
Hitting theaters on Apr. 4, A Nice Indian Boy will hopefully be the film that scratches audiences' romantic comedy itch, warming their hearts just in time for the end of winter.
