David
Synopsis:
Halfway through the film, Neil Nitin Mukesh is sitting on a wooden stool in a tiny London bathroom staring intensely at a small white pill in his palm while wearing this ridiculously oversized, faded grey zip-up hoodie with the cuffs frayed to absolute threads and a faint mustard stain right near the bottom pocket that I kept staring at instead of listening to his internal monologue about whether or not he's supposed to assassinate some random priest. But to understand why he's even holding that stupid pill in the first place, you have to look at how this whole bizarre experiment started in 1975 London where he plays a quiet, music-obsessed young guitarist who's just trying to live his life under the thumb of his strict, scripture-spouting adoptive father played by Vinay Virmani, except he falls head over heels for this deaf-mute girl named Roma, and she's played by Isha Sharwani, and they have all these silent little moments together that drag on for ages while he plays guitar chords that don't match the hand movements at all. So then the mob boss Noel pulls him into a hit, and he can't pull the trigger because he's a softie, and that whole London segment just kind of wraps up abruptly when everything falls apart and he's left totally stranded.
Anyway, then the movie violently yanks you away from London and drops you straight into 1999 Mumbai where Vikram shows up playing a totally different guy also named David, and he's a carefree, booze-swilling fisherman who's engaged to this lovely woman named Frenny, played by Monica Dogra, and they're having these endless beachside conversations about their upcoming wedding while drinking cheap beer and laughing at nothing, and the funny thing is that his dad is a blind priest who gets humiliated by some slimy Hindu nationalist politicians led by a guy named Ghani, and Vikram gets so blindingly furious about it that he completely loses his mind and goes on a drunken rampage right before his wedding day, smashing up cars and yelling at reporters in the street. Right after that, he gets recruited by a radical activist group to assassinate the very same politician on the eve of the national elections, and he agrees because he's angry, but then he has second thoughts at the exact worst moment. He misses the shot, gets beaten half to death by security guards, and the whole 1999 Mumbai subplot just sort of ends with a whimper on a rainy sidewalk.
Right after that, we jump again to 2010 Goa where the third David is a washed-up, perpetually drunk musician who wears Hawaiian shirts and plays cover songs to half-empty beach shacks, and he's dealing with a broken heart because his ex-fiancée, who is played by Lara Dutta, dumped him and married his absolute best friend instead. He spends his days stumbling around the sand with a bottle of rum in his hand, complaining to anyone who will listen about how miserable he is, until he meets this mysterious woman named Fanny, played by Tabu, who runs a local bar and dispenses gruel-thin wisdom while pouring him more drinks. The three Davids live in completely different eras and countries and don't know each other at all, but the writer tries to tie their stories together through thematic echoes of identity, religious tension, and bad life choices, which makes it feel less like a normal narrative and more like a collection of three distinct short films shoved awkwardly into one release. It is weirdly disjointed.
The Goa slacker segment finally picks up a bit of speed when Tabu's character convinces Neil Nitin Mukesh's London character—who has somehow crossed over into this timeline, or maybe it's just a metaphorical blending of the three guys—to help them pull off some half-baked revenge scheme against a corrupt local politician, and they're running through alleys and hiding behind boats while Tabu barks orders in her usual effortless way. They're all smoking cigarettes and sweating through their clothes in the humid Goan heat, and nobody cares about the plot anymore because it's just a bunch of moody close-ups and atmospheric guitar riffs designed to make the whole thing feel deeper than it actually is. It doesn't quite work, but it's ambitious, especially compared to the usual formulaic bollywood movies that clog up the box office every weekend. This project definitely tried to push the boundaries of standard hindi films by abandoning traditional storytelling structures, and even though people often argue about whether multi-genre anthologies like this actually succeed, you can't deny it stands out from typical bollywood releases just by casting Vikram and Tabu in such vastly different creative spaces. They tried something new.
The London David climbs up the creaky wooden stairs to the church altar with his guitar case slung over one shoulder, breathing heavily while the rain beats against the stained glass windows behind him. He pulls the heavy metal latch on the case, reaches inside past the worn cloth lining, and slowly takes out a loaded revolver instead of his instrument. He stands there in the dim, flickering candlelight, staring directly down the barrel at the empty wooden pews before slowly turning around and walking right back out the heavy oak doors without firing a single shot.
Vikram’s hair in the London segments of David looks like someone tried to style a wet mop with a garden fork during a gale force wind. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me every single time he walked into frame, which happens far too often in a movie that already demands a certain amount of stubborn patience from its audience. Bejoy Nambiar made a splash a few years ago with Shaitan, a picture that felt like it had been edited while someone was mainlining espresso, and here he tries to apply that same hyper-kinetic, split-screen, fast-cut aesthetic to an ambitious three-tiered narrative structure spanning decades, geographies, and musical genres.
The premise splits its attention across three men who all share the name David, though they occupy entirely different cinematic universes that occasionally bleed into one another through background radio chatter or distant silhouettes. Neil Nitin Mukesh plays a gangster in 1975 London who works for a ruthless mob boss played by Vinay Virmani before having an existential crisis about his loyalties when he falls for the boss's prospective bride, while Vikram portrays a clumsy, stuttering fisherman in 2010 Goa who accidentally falls in love with his best friend's mute fiancée played by Monica Dogra, and then there is a third David, a young musician in Mumbai during 1999 who is trying to find his footing while his father, a mild-mannered pastor played by Satish Kaushik, gets caught in the crosshairs of Hindu nationalist politicians.
If I'm honest, the London segment is the weakest link by a mile, mostly because Neil Nitin Mukesh has the emotional range of a very handsome piece of mahogany furniture. He glowers through monochrome alleys, he holds cigarettes with practiced melancholy—wait, let's scratch that word—he holds cigarettes with a dull, heavy-lidded seriousness that suggests he’s thinking about his next tax return rather than a life of crime. The dialogue in his portions feels like it was translated from a straight-to-video British crime thriller that nobody rented in 1994, full of flat threats and wooden posturing.
Then the film cuts to Goa, and the entire temperature drops by ten degrees into something loose and sun-bleached and genuinely charming. Vikram is a revelation there, playing against his usual action-hero type with floppy limbs, a permanent look of mild panic, and a physical comedy that recalls Jim Carrey in The Truman Show without ever feeling like an impersonation. He handles the physical gags and the quiet, heartbreaking romantic beats with an ease that makes the sluggish London sequences feel even more tedious by comparison. Monica Dogra matches his energy with a grounded, lovely naturalness, though Nambiar insists on shooting their scenes with so many lens flares and golden-hour filters that you feel like you're watching a perfume commercial directed by someone having a mild panic attack.
The Mumbai portion handles its political religious tensions with a surprising amount of grit, avoiding the usual broad strokes that most Hindi movies rely on when tackling communal riots and church-burning controversies. Tabu appears here as the older sister to the young musician, and she brings a lived-in, weary authority to scenes that otherwise threaten to tip over into heavy-handed melodrama. When she looks at her younger brother with a mixture of exasperation and deep, protective terror, you forget all about the disjointed editing and the jarring shifts in tone that plague the rest of the runtime. Akarsh Khurana and Satish Kaushik ground the domestic scenes with a quiet realism that stands in sharp contrast to the slick, music-video styling of the rest of the production.
The soundtrack is a massive kitchen-sink operation involving multiple composers, ranging from traditional qawwalis to heavy grunge rock and indie pop tracks that pop up every five minutes to remind us how cool everyone is supposed to be. Some of these needle-drops work brilliantly, especially when the music syncs up with the rapid-fire cuts of Nambiar’s editing suite, but others feel like the director just shuffled his personal iPod and slapped whatever came on next over a ten-minute montage of people walking slowly in the rain. The cinematography by Santhana Krishnan and R. Rathnavelu shifts wildly between gritty 16mm textures and glossy, high-definition digital sheen depending entirely on which decade and city the current David is inhabiting.
Bollywood movies have long struggled with portmanteau structures because directors often forget that an anthology needs a thematic glue stronger than just sharing a common name and a penchant for slow-motion gunfights. Nambiar is obsessed with style, sometimes to a fault, letting a scene linger on a spinning record or a burning cross for three beats too long just because it looks striking on a monitor. The screenplay gets bogged down in its own cleverness, constantly winking at the audience with callbacks and parallel motifs that don't actually deepen our understanding of identity or faith or broken families.
When the various narrative threads finally converge in a rushed, chaotic climax that tries to tie up three different decades of personal trauma in twenty minutes, the seams show badly. Yet there are moments of raw, unpolished brilliance scattered throughout the debris, particularly whenever Vikram is on screen fumbling his lines or staring dumbly at the ocean while local dogs bark in the background. It is an uneven, bloated, frustratingly ambitious piece of work that gets lost in its own stylistic ambitions more often than it should, leaving behind an impression less of a cohesive story and more of a talented director throwing every single idea he ever had at the wall to see what refuses to slide off.