Anurag Kashyap and Taapsee Pannu's Dobaaraa is a highly effective thriller

Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly did not follow the thriller playbook at all. Its nonlinear structure apart, the story grew more complicated with time, not less. By the time you hurtled towards the end, you realised this was an elaborate character study disguised as whodunit. The morality play became the main event and nobody complained because the execution was that good.

Kashyap has now made another atypical thriller, this time with the additional complexity of time travel — Dobaaraa , starring Taapsee Pannu, Pavail Gulati, Rahul Bhat, Saswata Chatterjee et al. It’s an official remake of the 2018 Spanish film Mirage, and for most of its two-hour runtime, follows the original faithfully while keeping a few tricks up its own sleeve all along. A beguiling mixture of murder mystery, time travel and romantic thriller, Dobaaraa keeps the audience guessing till the third act wraps up in triumphant fashion.

The cast all turn in fine, naturalistic performances, none more so than the prolific Pannu, who’s enjoying the finest phase of her career. Rahul Bhat (whose performance in Ugly was a revelation) does brilliantly as an incurable cad who just cannot help being wholly himself, even when every fibre of his being is telling him to rein himself in. Gulati has been trusted with a multi-dimensional role with substantial chunks of both noirish detachment and old-fashioned pathos, and he acquits himself adequately.

The story begins when a young boy named Amey is recording video cassettes of himself on an old, analog TV in the middle of an electrical storm in the 1990s. Upon seeing a commotion in the house next door in the middle of the night, Amey rushes out, is shocked to see his female neighbour’s corpse (killed, by all appearances, by her husband), runs out to the street outside only to be mowed down by the fire brigade. Over two decades later, Antara (Pannu) moves into the dead boy’s house with her husband (Bhatt) and their young daughter. Purely by chance, Antara discovers that Amey’s old TV—still tucked away in the attic of the house—is a wormhole of sorts, which can be used to communicate with the young Amey, now that the old electrical storm from 20+ years ago has returned, and shall persist for 72 hours.

Antara saves Amey’s life, but wakes up the next day to see her own life altered irrevocably—her husband’s married to a different woman, her daughter never existed and she’s a surgeon, not a nurse, at the hospital she remembers working. With the help of her boss (Nassar) and a sympathetic cop (Gulati) she has to figure out how to get her life back.

As is the case with most time-loop films, the pace of information dissemination is crucial here—give away too much too quickly and your story becomes predictable. Give away too little until the halfway mark and you risk losing the audience. Dobaaraa threads the needle beautifully in this context.

Also, Kashyap is on top form, visually speaking. The Gothic beats of the story are given full justice by the way Kashyap shoots these rundown old Pune buildings by night. Startlingly effective night-time shots –like the many shots framing the actual killing witnessed by Amey—are also similarly superb. There’s a surreal dreaminess, also, about the way Kashyap juggles the different looks attached with each reality or each timeline. Just about every shot conveys information or progresses character in an orderly fashion; the neatness of the shot-making is palpable. This is an experienced, assured hand working with a very relaxed frame of mind. Dobaaraa might even crack the top three Kashyap films of all time, and that’s no mean feat given the man’s track record.

Pannu, meanwhile, anchors this fast-paced, sometimes frenetic movie with a calm, commanding performance. Antara is a person who has to absorb and channel a lot of very shocking information in a short period of time and Pannu brings out the deliriousness of such a process very well. And once Antara is a little more adept at understanding the nature of her own ordeal, Pannu kicks things into top gear. In one scene in the second half where she confronts a cheating husband with his mistress at their hotel room, she’s absolutely terrifying without having to raise her voice once.

Amidst a slew of disappointing Bollywood films of late, Dobaaraa checks all the filmmaking boxes. It is a highly effective thriller that will appeal to a broad range of audiences.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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