Phillauri

Plot Summary

Kanan, a cool dude-bro from Canada, lands bang in the middle of Punjab to tie the knot with his 10th-standard sweetheart, Anu. He’s too hipster for social constructs like marriage, commitment and monogamy. Anu, meanwhile, has been waiting with baited breath.

Once the pre-wedding rituals begin, Kanan finds out that he’s manglik and must marry a tree before he can marry Anu, in order to avoid bad luck. Both Anu and Kanan’s families convince him to do it for the sake of the ritual and soon enough, he finds himself tying a thread around a huge tree while circling it. Wedding accomplished.

With one slight hitch that is. The tree happens to be the resting place of a certain Punjabi-girl ghost called Shashi.

Shashi - by way of the tree - is now bound to Kanan and automatically follows him back to the mansion in which the wedding party is put up. A lot of confusion around the unseen entity ensues, and eventually, Kanan finds out that Shashi is being haunted by something as well. Her past.

We’re now taken into a sepia-filtered Punjab of diffused sunlight, brown-green clothes, brick houses, poets-in-anonymity and soulful songs. Shashi, it turns out, was a poetess who fell in love with a singer. She was abandoned on her wedding day and committed suicide by hanging herself from the same tree that Kanan would marry almost 98 years later.

Back to the future, Kanan takes it upon himself to free Shashi of this half-dead state. A chance conversation with his grandmother and a quick Wikipedia search later, we find out that Shashi’s lover was actually at the Jallianwala Bagh at the time of the massacre and was killed there.

Kanan, Anu and Shashi’s ghost quickly embark on a road trip to Amritsar, where they find her lost lover’s VFX-rich ghost lingering around at Jallianwala Bagh. Shashi is reunited with her lover and as they hug, they burst into stardust under which Kanan embraces Anu and his fears about true love melt away.