Best of the Best review: Maitreyi, Priyanka's dance film get Bollywood right-ish

Maya and Anjali join a UCLA Bollywood-fusion dance team and find their friendship tested by ambition, romance and identity. The film smartly questions how diaspora culture gets performed, even if its satire stops short of a knockout.

In Short

• Maya and Anjali's friendship gives the film its strongest emotional footing
• The story uses competition to explore validation, belonging and cultural performance
• Hasan Minhaj adds humour without letting the satire slip into parody

There is a particular kind of Bollywood muscle memory that never really leaves you. Give you a dance floor, two friends, a competition and a little romantic confusion, and your brain will start supplying references before the film does. Best of the Best seems to know this. It borrows freely from the language of Bollywood while also poking fun at the way Hollywood has learned to package it.

Directed by Lena Khan, the film follows Maya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Anjali (Priyanka Kedia), childhood friends who join a competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team at UCLA. What begins as an exciting opportunity to prove themselves turns complicated when ambition, friendship, romance and questions of cultural identity begin competing for the same stage.

The basic template is familiar: an underdog team, a high-stakes competition, friendships under pressure and a final performance that promises to settle everything. But Best of the Best is more interested in examining the cultural shorthand that comes with a dance movie.

For anyone who has grown up on Bollywood, that makes for some amusing dj vu. There are flashes of Dil To Pagal Hai in the way dance, friendship and romance intersect, although the comparison is admittedly a stretch. If DTPH were being made in Hollywood through the lens of a contemporary diaspora story, perhaps it might look something like this — except Rahul and Ajay would be supporting players, while Maya and Anjali, like Nisha and Pooja, would be the emotional centre.

There is even the amusing coincidence of the names: Shah Rukh Khan’s Rahul was chasing Maya, while Maitreyi Ramakrishnan is Maya here. Maybe it means nothing. But Bollywood trains you to look for unexpected connections.

The film itself is more interested in why those connections exist. Hollywood’s version of Bollywood has long relied on a set of recognisable images: colourful celebrations, elaborate choreography, passionate families and characters whose Indianness can be communicated in a handful of visual cues. Best of the Best knowingly plays with those expectations. But it also turns the lens inward, asking what happens when the diaspora begins performing the same version of itself because it is the version everyone already understands.

That is where the film finds its sharpest idea and where it doesn’t quite go far enough. It recognises that stereotypes survive not only because outsiders impose them, but because communities can sometimes embrace, exaggerate and eventually internalise them. The film gets some good laughs from that contradiction. Yet it often retreats into the comfort of the very conventions it is teasing. The satire identifies the problem more confidently than it dismantles it.

Fortunately, Maya and Anjali give the film something more substantial to hold on to. Their friendship is the emotional spine of the story, and Ramakrishnan and Kedia make their history believable. Maya’s desire to win isn’t simply about a trophy. It becomes tangled with validation, insecurity and the pressure to prove that she belongs. Anjali, meanwhile, has to confront what it means to find herself and not succumb to outside pressures.

Neither is turned into the villain of the other person’s story. Their conflict comes from something more recognisable: two people growing in different directions and discovering that friendship doesn’t automatically make competition painless.

Ramakrishnan brings an appealing intensity to Maya, while Kedia gives Anjali a quieter vulnerability. Their chemistry works particularly well when the film allows them to be friends rather than contestants. The romantic track is pleasant but never as interesting as the friendship at its centre.

The supporting cast helps keep the film from becoming too earnest. Hasan Minhaj, who also co-wrote the movie, is particularly effective because he understands the film’s comic register without treating every scene like a stand-up set. His character gets to poke at the seriousness surrounding competitive dance while also becoming part of the world the film is gently satirising. Chaneil Kular, meanwhile, brings an easy charm to Arjun, adding a romantic thread without pulling the film too far away from its central friendship.

The dance sequences provide the expected spectacle. They are energetic and well choreographed, mixing Bollywood vocabulary with contemporary and hip-hop styles. The performances are at their best when they feel like an expression of the characters rather than a pause in the narrative.

But the film occasionally gets trapped by its own familiarity. The competition structure is predictable, some supporting characters are defined more by function than personality, and a few jokes land because the stereotype is familiar rather than because the film has found a clever way to subvert it.

That leaves Best of the Best in an interesting middle ground. It is too self-aware to be a straightforward Bollywood dance movie, but not consistently incisive enough to become the cultural satire it could have been. Still, there is warmth underneath the comedy. The film understands that identity is not something you solve by choosing between cultures. Sometimes it is about figuring out which parts are genuinely yours and which ones you have simply learned to perform.

And perhaps that is the most Bollywood thing about Best of the Best: even when it is trying to question the cliches, it cannot resist dancing along with them.

Best of the Best is streaming on Netflix.

- Ends