Dobaaraa movie review: Anurag Kashyap, Taapsee Pannu’s time-travel saga is mildly engaging when not verbose

Language: Hindi

In the year 2021, a young nurse named Antara Awasthi (Taapsee Pannu) and her husband Vikas chance upon an old camera, television and cassettes in their home in Hinjewadi, Pune. When they plug in these devices out of curiosity, they see a boy on their screen. The couple soon learn from a friend that he is an earlier occupant of the house called Anay, that he witnessed a murder in 1996 and while trying to escape the killer, was killed himself.

Shortly thereafter, on a stormy night just like the one on which Anay died, Antara slips through a crack in the time and space continuum, coming face to face with the child moments before his death. While communicating with Anay, she ends up altering his life. Antara then wakes up to find that her own life as she remembered it has been erased, she is not married to Vikas, their daughter does not exist and she is a skilled neurosurgeon.

Now, to salvage her present, Dr Antara Vashishta must figure out what happened when she accidentally, and with the best of intentions, disrupted Anay’s story in Dobaaraa, director Anurag Kashyap’s visitation of the time-travel genre wrapped in a murder mystery.

The title of the film is a play on words, doubling up as the Hindi “dobaaraa” meaning “again” and “do baarah (02:12)” or 12 minutes past 2 o’clock that is crucial in this plot. Dobaaraa is an official remake of Oriol Paulo’s Mirage (2018 / Spanish). The original clearly referenced the butterfly effect in chaos theory, which, metaphorically, suggests that a minor occurrence such as a butterfly flapping its wings can influence a cataclysmic event like a tornado unfolding in a distant place weeks later. It’s a scientific premise tailormade for popular culture, offering as it does an alluring, poetic reminder that a human being’s seemingly tiny actions can have consequences on the course of the universe, as Antara finds out to her dismay in Dobaaraa.

When the going is good, Dobaaraa is suspenseful. Here’s a pro tip: if you have not already seen Mirage, don’t watch it before Dobaaraa. I opted not to, and as a result, especially in the pre-interval half, Antara’s questions became my own. I found myself intrigued by where her today was headed because she interfered with someone else’s yesterday, what had become of Anay, and where the intersection of her path with Vikas in 2021 would lead her.

The all-round effectiveness of time travel, sci-fi and fantasy dramas, however, hinges on their outlandish hypotheses sounding perfectly sensible, logical and convincing when articulated in a storyline. This is what makes it possible for intelligent viewers to happily swallow the tale of a man bitten by a radioactive spider developing superpowers or a boy wizard in a world of Muggles without feeling stupid. Dobaaraa occasionally struggles with this. Antara too easily buys into the idea that time travel is an actual possibility. And while most characters naturally assume she has lost her mind, one individual’s cooperation is so noticeable, that this person’s part in the jigsaw puzzle – positioned as a big reveal in the script – can be seen coming from a mile (even more so than in Mirage).

These flaws are not ruinous though. What truly subtracts from Dobaaraa’s impactfulness is its verbosity. Literally too much explanation is offered for the back and forth that has messed up Antara’s being, too much is elaborated upon, and by the end, there is little left for a viewer’s imagination to play around with. This wordiness sporadically robs the narrative of urgency so necessary for the tale of a distraught mother desperate to find her beloved daughter.

Like Mirage, Dobaaraa too is muddled about the Que sera, sera (Whatever will be, will be) element in its philosophy because of an apparent determination to feature a relatable romance in every parallel sphere that Antara enters. If what is meant to be is bound to happen regardless of the choices we make, if the tornado will inevitably rage irrespective of whether or not the butterfly flaps its wings, then what is the point of flapping our wings?

This is not to say that Dobaaraa is a lost cause. There is enough tension and thrill in Antara’s saga to hold attention despite the weaknesses in the storytelling. The crime committed in Anay’s realities – the untampered and tampered ones – yield genuinely scary scenes that are far more chilling than they were in Mirage. Given the limitations of the source material and its Hindi reworking, Taapsee is fair enough as Antara. Aarrian Sawant as Anay and Rahul Bhat as Antara’s husband Vikas are solid. The cast as a whole delivers satisfactory performances and their collective charisma could hold up any film anyway.

All this being said, when a director of Anurag’s standing chooses to remake a film, it raises a question: why this one? Mirage is moderately entertaining but not earth-shattering enough to merit a recreation in a country that has a potential film script developing at every street corner, every public event, in every private home. Anurag has ferreted out those stories for two decades now, imbuing them with the fragrance of the soil in which they were set, most famously of course in Gangs of Wasseypur 1 and 2 that catapulted him on to the global stage in 2012, but most brilliantly, I would argue, in his highly underrated 2018 film Mukkabaaz starring Vineet Kumar Singh and Zoya Hussain. Not only is Mirage not particularly worthy of being remade, more so in a day and age when a dubbed English version of it is just a Netflix subscription away, but it lacks the cultural rootedness and political awareness associated with Anurag-ness that might have justified the decision to greenlight the project in the first place. Dobaaraa could have taken place in any city in India without the change making any difference to it.

In Mirage, the storm that creates the time warp coincides with the historic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Dobaaraa does not even have a similar political parallel that could be likened to a seismic, fantastical natural phenomenon that might break Time itself.

So yeah, Dobaaraa is mildly engaging and in parts frightening, but far bigger than the concern over what happens to Antara is this: why did Anurag Kashyap consider this film worth his while? The adapted screenplay by Nihit Bhave feels more like a translation than an adaptation, and the Anurag who once gave us Paanch, Black Friday, Wasseypur, Ugly, Raman Raghav 2.0 and Mukkabaaz comes across as not being invested enough in Dobaaraa to give it his best.

Rating: 2.5 (out of 5 stars) 

Dobaaraa was premiered at the London Indian Film Festival in June 2022 and screened at the ongoing Indian Film Festival of Melbourne. It is now in theatres.

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial

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