Metro In Dino movie review: Sara Ali Khan plays a Kareena Kapoor-coded character in Anurag Basu's annoying and exhilarating film

It stands to reason that Metro In Dino will have thematic similarities with its spiritual predecessor Life... In A Metro: warring couples, predatory bosses, commitment-phobic men, confused women, straying and returning, sacrifice and recompense.It also has straight-up reprises. Konkona Sen Sharma, whose pairing with Irrfan was one of the highlights of the original, is the only one from the previous cast making a return, with Pankaj Tripathi standing in for the late, great actor; and the three-member band, led by Pritam, is strewn all over the film, like it was in the earlier iteration.

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In the interim— eighteen years is a long time—so much has changed. Those clunky cellphones, which a couple of characters used in the earlier film, have changed to the sleek oblongs everyone carries these days, with laptops, tablets, and an overuse of every other device that promises connection, but provides only disconnection. You don’t need an empty flat with a key, the idea borrowed from Billy Wilder's classic The Apartment, to plan an assignation; you can just create a profile on a dating app and get right down to sexting, even if you choose to call it Linger, rather than Tinder. But the one thing, if you go by Anurag Basu’s characters, that hasn't changed are humans and their frailties and egos which come in the way of true connection. Pankaj and Konkona, as Monty (I still haven’t got over that name; who would ever have thought of Irrfan as a still-a-virgin-at-nearly-forty, unable to hide sexual neediness but wistful with it?) and Kajol, are weathering the sort of boredom that besets most married couples who behave like old socks, rather than sparkly stockings.