Aanand L Rai’s ‘Tere Ishq Mein’, positioned as a spiritual successor to ‘Raanjhanaa’, closes not with catharsis, but with devastation. Instead of redemption, the film chooses ambiguity, leaving viewers haunted by its final moments and the fates of Shankar (Dhanush) and Mukti (Kriti Sanon). This time, the storm of love is not romanticised; it is punished.
The film’s climax unfolds in Leh, Ladakh, amid an Indian Air Force base preparing for combat. Shankar, now a skilled but reckless flight lieutenant, crosses paths with Mukti, who arrives disguised as his mandatory therapist to avoid disciplinary action. She is pregnant, ill, and emotionally exhausted, a woman in survival mode.
Their reunion is anything but tender. Old wounds resurface, and Mukti’s motivation becomes clear: she expects to die and, in her desperate mind, Shankar is the only person capable of nurturing her child.
Mukti is terrified of losing her husband Jasjeet, of dying herself, and of her child being left alone. Her refusal to clear Shankar for duty stems from a broken need: she wants him alive to look after her son.
Shankar negotiates, if she signs, he will ensure at least one of the two men survives to raise the baby. It is a bargain where he becomes the collateral.
Once Mukti signs, Shankar heads into battle. In the last minutes, he rejects repeated orders to eject from his aircraft. Instead, he crashes into an enemy vessel, triggering a massive explosion, a kamikaze act framed not as military recklessness, but emotional atonement.
For Shankar, this is the only way to protect Mukti’s child and fulfil his promise.
The film cuts to Mukti in the hospital, undergoing delivery while battling liver failure. The tone suggests she does not survive, though the film leaves her actual death unspoken, reinforcing the idea of poetic reunion.
Shankar’s death is almost certain. Mukti’s implied death mirrors it, suggesting that in life they were doomed apart, but in death they finally belong together.
‘Tere Ishq Mein’ charts Shankar’s transformation, from obsessive, reckless lover to self-sacrificing soldier. His destructive energy, once guided through UPSC by Mukti’s father, culminates here as martyrdom. His final act is not rage but surrender, a death for someone else’s future.
Meanwhile, Mukti’s arc exposes a woman who made devastating emotional choices, using Shankar, marrying someone she did not love, and finally realising too late where her heart lay.
Their union is not romantic fulfilment, it is disaster dressed as destiny.
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When the film shows Jasjeet alive aboard his naval ship, witnessing the explosion, it quietly fulfils Mukti’s wish, her child will have a father. But that father is not Shankar. His death becomes the price she demanded of him.
Love here is not healing. It is destructive, consuming, and terminal, a conclusion mirrored by the line repeated in the film, “Prem mein mrityu hai, mukti nahi.” (There is death in love, not liberation.)
The film ends with Mukti giving birth. The child’s gender remains ambiguous, but the script hints it may be a boy, echoing Shankar’s haunting line wishing she would understand the pain of losing a son to love.
The baby becomes the thread that could bind another story, perhaps another generation’s doomed romance.
‘Tere Ishq Mein’ does not offer resolution; rather, it forces viewers to sit with discomfort. Its ending is less about whether Shankar and Mukti live or die, and more about what their demise represents: obsession disguised as devotion, sacrifice mistaken for love, and the tragic cost of emotional dependency.
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