Resul Pookutty on Creating the Haunting Soundscape of Gustaakh Ishq, Manish Malhotra’s Debut Production

In Gustaakh Ishq, longing has a specific sound and it was thus that Academy Award–winning sound designer Resul Pookutty was brought onto the film early in pre-production. His mandate was unusually difficult, to evoke yearning without depending on background score or conventional cues. The swelling violins or cascading piano lines had to be debunked to just weave the world. Pookutty describes it as one of the most delicate challenges of his career. “Vibhu (Puri, director) told me, ‘I want the sound to ache, not speak.’ That’s a beautiful brief, but also a terrifying one. You can’t hide behind music. Everyday things become a part of the emotional grammar.”

The idea was to externalise the inner state of the characters. Instead of leaning on dialogue, Pookutty constructed a minimalist palette of ambient cues - from the slow creak of an old wooden door, the uneven sound of a passing horse carriage, the soft echo of a distant azaan drifting over rooftops at dawn.

“These sounds carry memory of people and we tapped into that,” Pookutty explains. Pookutty and director Vibhu Puri worked scene by scene, stripping away anything that felt decorative. The result is a BGM and sound that sits almost invisibly under the film, shaping mood without ever drawing attention to itself. "To create the tonal quality of longing, we embedded these subtly under natural ambiences so the audience experiences a physical pull without realising why the creaking door, for example, was layered with three different recordings. When combined, it behaves almost like a sigh. The trick was to keep it organic enough. The azaan was treated with a reverb based on the acoustics of Old Delhi courtyards. Longing is a very fragile emotion so it had to sound a certain way.”

Gustaakh Ishq, produced by Manish Malhotra and Dinesh Malhotra under Stage5 Production, is headlined by Fatima Sana Shaikh, Vijay Varma Naseeruddin Shah and Sharib Hashmi and releases 28 November 2025.