Dobaaraa: Bollywood Mystery Thriller Film

Movie Name: Dobaaraa
Directed by: Anurag Kashyap
Starring: Taapsee Pannu, Pavail Gulati, Nassar, Rahul Bhat, Himanshi Choudhry, Saswata Chatterjee, Sukant Goel, Medini Kelamane, Madhurima Roy, Nidhi Singh, Myra Rajpal, Arrian Sawant, Shaurya Duggal, Farida Venkat
Genre: Mystery, Drama, Thriller
Release Date: 19 August, 2022
Running Time: 120 Minutes
Rating:

A woman gets an opportunity to save the life of a 12-year old boy who witnessed a death during a thunderstorm which happened 25 years ago, by getting connected through the television set during a similar storm in the present.

Movie Profile:

Dobaaraa, also stylized as 2 12, an upcoming Indian Hindi-language mystery drama film directed by Anurag Kashyap. It stars Taapsee Pannu and Pavail Gulati.

Dobaaraa is a remake of the 2018 Spanish film Mirage. It opened the London Indian Film Festival 2022 and is scheduled for theatrical release on 19 August 2022.

Anurag Kashyap’s film “Dobaaraa” is scheduled to be released in theatres on August 19, the makers announced Thursday.

Billed as an edgy thriller, the movie stars Taapsee Pannu and Pavail Gulati.

Film is jointly produced by Ektaa Kapoor’s Cult Movies, a new division under her Balaji Telefilms banner, and Sunir Khetarpal’s ATHENA.

The film marks Kashyap and Pannu’s third collaboration after the 2018 hit “Manmarziyaan” and biographical drama “Saand Ki Aankh” (2019), on which he served as producer.

It also reunites Pannu with Gulati, who previously co-starred in 2020’s “Thappad”.

Film is also set to open this year’s London Indian Film Festival (LIFF) on June 23.

Dobaaraa Movie Trailer:

Dobaaraa Movie Review:

While Taapsee is at the top of her game, Anurag skillfully executes a more perceptive draft of the original Spanish mystery drama

With the penetration of affordable internet and the boom of OTT , filmmakers who look to adapt a foreign film to a desi milieu are under greater scrutiny since it’s now easier to draw comparisons between the original and the renewed version.

Last week, director Advait Chandan labored to imbue an Indian pulse to Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump . However, this week, Anurag Kashyap has effortlessly brought Oriol Paulo’s Mirage home with Dobaaraa. Of course, the genres are different but while Advait felt like carrying the weight of the iconic original, Anurag deftly executes a more perceptive draft of the Spanish mystery drama, giving it the feel of an edgy thriller that doesn’t take a breath to show off its emotional depth or philosophical takeaways.

In 1992, when Ram Gopal Varma spooked us with Raat, it startled us since until then, except for Gehrayee (1980), we seldom brushed shoulders with the supernatural in an everyday setting. Anurag does the same with sci-fi and time travel. He makes us invest in the improbable. Usually, horror emanates from evil, but what if goodness sparks off a scary tale.

Dobaaraa tells us how an action even when done in good faith could have calamitous results. Almost three decades ago, a young boy called Aney was killed during a storm in Pune after witnessing a crime in the neighbourhood. His death haunted his friends for years. 25 years later, when Antra Awasthi (Taapsee Pannu) shifts to the house where Aney and his mother once lived, she finds a way to communicate with the young boy using an old cassette, a video recorder, and a television with an antenna. Like any compassionate person, Antra tries to save the little boy’s life. She corrects the past but it spirals her present out of control. Antra wakes up in a parallel universe where she is no longer a nurse, but a doctor. More importantly, her daughter Avanti is missing and her husband Vikas (Rahul Bhat) doesn’t recognise her as Antra. The unique storm is back and before it lasts, she has to find her way back to her timeline and convince police officer Chandan (Pavail Gulati).

Though Dobaaraa has elements of the supernatural, but at the heart of it, it is a mother’s desperate search for her daughter and a boy’s urge to make the world believe in his story. Unlike Paulo, whose films are in great demand for Hindi adaptations, Anurag has the rare ability to come out of the narrative, become the audience, pass a comment on the implausibility of the situation, and then get on with the job with conviction. It is a kind of handholding that the audience requires for a subject like Dobaaraa that gets abstruse after a point. Be it the application of the Terminator reference or a sarcastic remark on a man’s infidelity across timelines, Anurag ensures that the sci-fi genre loses its stiffness in Indian conditions and, along with writer Nihit Bhave, has made the complex premise more accessible.

In Taapsee, Anurag has a malleable actor who is at the top of her game here. She lives the confidence and vulnerability of Antra in equal measures. The scene with veteran actor Nasser where Antra breaks down at the absurdity of the situation shows how Taapsee could create an emotional swell in favorable conditions. Further, she gets good support from Pavail who reflects the innocence behind the stoic presence of the character. Rahul, who is often found in Anurag’s films, serves the script well. And, Saswata Chatterjee has not been stretched in a role that could have been quirkier.

When the premise begins to fall apart, it is the performances that keep us emotionally engaged and Gaurav Chatterjee and Dhiman Karmakar generate a sense of urgency with their throbbing musical score and sound design — something that was missing in the original. Sylvester Fonseca’s cinematography recreates the ominous atmosphere and Aarti Bajaj’s sharp editing doesn’t allow the screenplay to sag.

In the film, a voice on the radio repeatedly says that geomagnetic storms raise the adrenaline level in humans. Dobaaraa is once such adrenaline-pumping storm.