One’s senses immediately get a strong whiff of prior acquaintance when Rehbra opens. Talking fast and showing faster — the narrator’s voice compliments the quick overview of the backstories — we run straight into Bubbly (Ayesha Omer) and Danish (Ahsan Khan), an odd pair with poles-apart ideologies.

Bubbly, a young woman from Lahore who is set to marry in the coming weeks, thinks first and asks questions later. Danish, a real estate magnate who stars in his company’s commercials — because he is just that good looking — thinks first and then lets his actions speak for himself. The odd pair is perfect fodder for a quirky romance-drama that harks of ’90s Bollywood.

Bubbly and Danish have a strange karmic connection to intercity travels and trains. The two first meet at a train station where Bubbly mistakes Danish for a coolie (he was shooting the aforementioned commercial for his real estate brand). Bubbly, we learn, is visiting her friend (Srha Asghar) in Karachi before she goes back to wed her childhood friend — who is a really nice guy, by the way. Danish is set to marry his childhood friend as well (played by Sarish Khan), because it makes sense; they don’t love each other but feel that comfort and familiarity are good enough causes to marry in their case.

Soon, Bubbly and Danish meet again on a train, this time on the way to Lahore from Karachi (there were problems with intercity air travel) and sparks fly, albeit a bit awkwardly.

Rehbra is a quirky romance-drama that is reminiscent of ’90s Bollywood, and tells an engaging story with a bit of adventure and an abundance of humour

Later, another train ride leads the plot to an unanticipated change of direction, when a gang of highwaymen — dacoits with high morals and bald heads (it’s their gang’s prerequisite) — raid the train and abduct passengers.

If films were a reflection of its maker’s ideologies, then Rehbra would be a near-perfect representation of Amin Iqbal — a veteran television director known for tent-pole serials (his last was the Sajal Aly, Azaan Sami Khan and Yumna Zaidi starrer Ishq-i-Laa for Hum TV).

Rehbra, like Iqbal and his works, is unfussy and easy. It doesn’t hammer in excessiveness or melodrama — even when the plot warrants some of it. You get a balanced helping of everything, with just enough details to feel right at home with the characters.

The story sets its gaze firmly on both Danish and Bubbly whose actions carry the narrative, for better or worse. The two work quite well as eventual best buds — both Ahsan and Ayesha have good screen chemistry, given the limitations of the screenplay also written by Iqbal — but accepting the two as a romantic pair is a bit of a stretch. Scenes, especially when Danish and Bubbly are at the behest of the dacoits, and the interim passage of events before the climax, fail to convince you otherwise.

The scenes are there, mind you, as is the ear-catching soundtrack by Seemab Sen (Wrong No. 2) and Imran Ali — the wonderful, very Bollywood-ish title track comes quite late in the film — but one feels, for the most part, that Danish and Bubbly are good friends who share a bit of spark that can eventually blossom into romance; the way that ‘eventually’ comes to pass feels hurried and tacked on.

Sohail Sameer, as the Seraiki-speaking head of the gang, does a great job as a multi-layered villain with a humanistic agenda, and his on-screen wife played by Farah Tufail exhibits a much more refined take on love in hardly a minute-long scene.

Ahsan Khan — always the good-looking lead in any film — has a good handle on Danish, especially in the first-half of the film. Danish, one notices, has a wide-eyed, nearly unblinking sense of wonder whenever he meets Bubbly. It’s a side of life he hasn’t seen, if you see his reactions. Ayesha, as Bubbly, surprisingly pulls off the ‘bubbly’ bit of her character with enthusiasm and consistency (the film was shot both before and after the Covid-19 pandemic, and one can see signs of age and maturity on the two leads). There are bits of their characterisations late in the film that one cannot agree with (and because of spoilers, one cannot talk about), but other than that there is not a whole lot one can criticise about Rehbra (there is the colour-grading but everything else, technically, is in order).

Amin tells a good story about conventional romance that has a bit of adventure and a lot of quirk and humour (courtesy of Ayesha’s character). It is a tale that one can understand because one has seen these types of films time and again. It is not a rip-off, in case the question pops into anyone’s head, but it is familiar in the way movies tended to be familiar once upon a time.

Released by Mandviwalla Entertainment and produced by Saira Afzal, Rehbra also stars Saba Faisal and Ghulam Mohiuddin, and is playing in cinema screens now

Published in Dawn, ICON, June 26th, 2022