Cast: Taapsee Pannu, Pavail Gulati, Rahul Bhat, Saswata Chatterjee
Director: Anurag Kashyap
Dobaaraa is the third Hindi remake of a Oriol Paulo movie in four years.
The Invisible Guest (2016) was crafted by Sujoy Ghosh into Badla ( Pannu and Amitabh Bachchan) and Jeethu Joseph realigned El Cuerpo (2012) into The Body.
Anurag Kashyap does a phenomenal job of repurposing Oriol Paulo’s Adriana Ugarte and Alvaro Morte starrer Mirage from 2018.
In the original, the story combines the emotional horror of a missing child saga with a crazy sci-fi twist.
Twenty-five years ago a young boy named Nico (Julio Bohigas-Couto) was murdered during a 72-hour storm after witnessing a man kill a woman. Nico’s tragic and untimely death has haunted his friends and loved ones for years. So when a modern day Dr. Vera Roy (Adriana Ugarte) finds a way to communicate with the past version of Nico using an old VHS, she does what any reasonable person would do. She tries to save this little boy’s life.
Ultimately she succeeds, but altering the past comes with a massive toll on her present. After telling Nico about his fate, Vera wakes up in a parallel timeline. She’s now no longer a nurse, but a doctor. Her husband David (Álvaro Morte) is a stranger to her. And her beloved daughter Gloria no longer exists. Vera has 72 hours to fix what she’s broken and convince Inspector Leyra (Chino Darín) that she’s not insane. Yet as she continues on this journey, she starts to wonder which of her two timelines is real?
Dobaaraa, set in a Pune suburb in India, complies with the original storyline but also stands out in its style, script and pace in very unique ways that only Anurag Kashyap can pull off as he puts in opposition different characters playing mind games in a disruptive thunderstorm.
Sylvester Fonseca’s cinematography builds the mood of the movie perfectly, the script builds its hooks in early frames. The screenplay keeps the hooks coming as the intrigue builds into a story of time, space and reality with revelations of lies, secrets, illicit liaisons and a swirling world of alternate realities.
A boy videotapes himself on a stormy night. While he is in the process, he hears a commotion next door and sneaks into the neighbor’s house to find the wife of his neighbour (Saswata Chatterjee) lying dead on the floor while her husband has a bloody knife in his hand. The alarmed boy makes a dash towards the street and dies.
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In an interplay of the past and the present, years later the new owner, a nurse moves into the house of the kid with her husband and six year old kid and stumbles upon the boy’s incomplete video recording . But can the fate of the boy still be altered? As the nw owner of the house figures out a way to reach out to the boy, ahead of his death in the past, can she warn him about his impending fate?
Taapsee Pannu performs her role effortlessly and deserves to be recognized for her prowess in playing a complex character caught in two separate quantums decades apart.
In one reality, she is a mother to a six-year old girl and a nurse, yet in another she is a highly regarded surgeon desperately looking for her missing daughter. All this is wrapped in the bigger story of dysfunctional marriages and cheating husbands but questioning these moral grounds is not what the movie wastes its time on.
The movie completely focuses on distortion of realities and its aftermath on the mind of a woman who has ended up in a situation that she cannot fully cognize.
Pavail Gulati features as a cop investigating the vanishing of the protagonist’s daughter and Rahul Bhat is the woman’s duplitious husband in one of the two realities that she occupies deliver magnificently.
M Nassar has a consequential cameo as a veteran doctor whose presence is crucial to Taapsee’s character’s attempts to decode the her timelines.
Dobaaraa does not break down the concepts for its audience like most such scripts do and that is a relief because it leaves the audience with a lot of work to do – and that is the reason the audience get intrigued and engaged.
However, one should also point out that the movie is pretty basic to follow for a person of average intelligence.
On the whole, a fun, intriguing and extremely engaging watch
