Dobaaraa Movie Review : A Winning Thriller That Demands All Your Concentration

Story:

In the 1990s, in a wild thunderstorm night, 12-year-old Anay dies in a road accident brusquely after he sees his next-door neighbor covering up his wife’s murder. Twenty-five years afterward, in a bizarre turn of events, on the same stormy night, Antara finds herself in front of a TV set through which she tries to save Anay’s life. It sets in motion a sequence of events that change the reality around her.

 

Review:

The official remake of the Spanish movie Mirage, Do Baaraa is set in Pune and oscillates amid the mid-1990s and the current times. The sequence of events sets in with 12-year-old Anay (...) getting bumped off by a profound vehicle while trying to escape from his neighbour’s (Saswata Chatterjee) house after witnessing a misdeed. Twenty-five years later on, Antara (Taapsee), who was a nurse at a local hospital, moves into Anay’s house as its new owner with her spouse. On a turbulent night, exactly identical to the one on which Anay died, Antara, alert of Anay’s death, finds herself communicating with Anay with the help of his old TV set and video cassette. In due course of doing that, she accidentally sets in motion a series of events that changes her reality.

 

Anurag Kashyap’s retelling of Mirage is intricate and keeps you hooked. Aarti Bajaj’s editing should get due credit for making the runtime interesting for most part. The film engages you from the first frame when you’re sucked into the feeling that something menacing is about to happen. As things begin to open out one by one, you speculate where all of this is heading, eager that course-correction for the characters’ journeys will find its way into the narrative at some point. It’s only sometime towards the fag end when one starts feeling twitchy with the runtime. Shortening the length a bit would have made the thriller even tauter.

 

Writer Nihit Bhave’s adapted screenplay (also the dialogue part) is quite balanced - it doesn’t lose touch with the original while adding a reasonable Indian touch to it. The character graphs are unsoiled and simple. The screenplay also has a dash of straight-faced humor which is very cool. The narrative sticks to its blueprint of being idealistic, time-travel thriller which is not too deep like a lot of Anurag’s other movies, but finely layered and complicated.

 

Taapsee Pannu and Pavail Gulati’s performances balance the writing and the tonality of the film. The narrative is centered on these two actors and their effort to get under the skin of their character is perceptible and the result is quite believable.

 

The movie has two songs, although the plot didn’t need tracks to push the events ahead. Also, in more than a few places, the production design team needed to pay more heed to the minute details. Also, with Anurag and Taapsee in the blend, one expected a little more than what one gets from this movie - that extra edge and emotional depth which makes their combination crackling to an extra degree.

 

Dobaaraa is a winning thriller which is worth your time but do make sure that you don’t spend too much time munching the popcorn, lest you are going to miss the beat. This one needs all your concentration, so go dive into it!