Dobaaraa
Synopsis:
Dobaaraa is this sci-fi thriller directed by Anurag Kashyap that's actually an official remake of a Spanish movie, which totally threw people off because usually bollywood movies don't mess around with time-travel murder mysteries quite like this. Taapsee Pannu plays Antra, a regular married woman living in a rainy suburban house with her cute daughter and a husband who is honestly kind of annoying and distracted all the time, and they just moved into this property where a kid named Anay used to live way back in nineteen ninety six.
Anay died during a massive lightning storm while watching his eccentric neighbor, Raja uncle, play a weird cassette tape on an old television set, and the camera just lingers way too long on this ugly, peeling striped wallpaper in the background of that flashback scene that honestly looks like it was bought at a discount clearance bin in nineteen ninety five. Stuff happens and Antra finds that exact same old video camera and vintage television set sitting in the house, and because she's home alone during another crazy storm, she turns the thing on and somehow starts talking through the screen to young Anay across a twenty five year time gap.
She figures out she can warn the kid about the terrible fate waiting for him when he witnesses a murder next door, and she shouts, "Don't go outside!" right into the glass. And then boom, her entire reality shifts because she successfully alters the past, which means when she wakes up the next morning, her daughter doesn't exist anymore and her husband treats her like a total stranger who's losing her mind, and honestly, the sheer panic on Taapsee's face here is just wild.
Right around this point, we hit the interval block of the movie, which is standard for Hindi films, though there isn't any random item song shoved into a desert to break the tension, thank goodness, because that would have totally killed the moody, rain-soaked vibe.
Look, Pawail Gulati plays this cop named Abhay who investigates the original cold case and slowly realizes Antra isn't just hallucinating, even though everyone else in the movie thinks she belongs in a psychiatric ward. He helps her figure out the time-travel mechanics of the television set, and they realize that every single time Antra tries to fix the timeline to get her daughter back, things get infinitely worse and she keeps jumping into alternate realities where she's either divorced, a murderer, or an entirely different person altogether. Nassar pops up as this creepy doctor mentor figure, and there are endless loops of conversations about alternate dimensions, television static, and stormy nights that somehow connect the past and the present through a cursed electronic appliance.
And then the movie speeds through a massive sequence where Antra has to track down the killer in the present day while simultaneously messaging young Anay in the past to prevent the original murder that started the whole mess, leading to a frantic rooftop confrontation where she's bleeding, crying, and desperately trying to survive.
Antra finally destroys the old television set with a heavy metal pipe while crying hysterically, which snaps the time loop for good and restores a peaceful timeline where her husband and daughter are back and everything is completely normal again. She walks out the front door into the bright morning sunshine, smiles at her kid, and drops the heavy metal pipe onto the porch floor with a loud metallic clank.
Pavail Gulati’s jacket in the second half of Dobaaraa is just a little too stiff around the shoulders, like it was unpacked from a garment bag five minutes before they yelled action and never quite settled into the shape of a man who lives in a damp, leaky London suburb. If I'm honest, that wardrobe stiffness distracted me more than the logic gaps in the time-jump sequences. We are supposed to believe this ordinary finance guy has been quietly unraveling for twenty-six years over a dead kid he barely knew, yet he looks like he just stepped out of a Zara catalog that had a very specific brief for melancholic brooding. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time he leaned against a damp brick wall.
Directing a high-concept sci-fi thriller is hard enough when you have a hundred million dollars and Christopher Nolan in your ear, but Anurag Kashyap is trying to reverse-engineer Oriol Paulo’s Spanish mind-bender Mirage with the budget of a mid-tier drama and an editing suite that feels rushed. Hindi films generally struggle with the mechanics of temporal paradoxes because our writers prefer emotional logic over clockwork precision, and Dobaaraa falls into that exact trap about twenty minutes in when the television set starts acting as a two-way portal. Kashyap keeps the camera moving, shoving lenses into corners and cutting on erratic beats, but the spatial geography of the two houses twenty-six years apart never quite clicks in your head. You spend half your time trying to figure out which floor Taapsee Pannu is on instead of actually worrying about whether she can save the boy behind the cathode-ray tube.
Taapsee has built a whole career out of playing women who look like they are about to put their fist through a drywall, and Dobaaraa doesn't really give her anything new to do with that specific brand of righteous exhaustion. She shouts at monitors, she gasps at static, she runs down rainy alleys with her hair plastered to her cheeks in that way that looks very cinematic on a poster but completely useless for actual survival. Yet there is a genuine, jagged intensity to the way she handles her panic when the timeline starts splintering around her like cheap glass, especially in the scenes where she is trying to convince her ex-husband that she hasn't lost her mind. She anchors the movie simply by refusing to wink at the absurdity of talking to a dead boy through a flickering screen, even when the dialogue gets so exposition-heavy that it threatens to pull the whole apparatus down.
The supporting cast features Nassar in a role that requires him to look wise, slightly weary, and permanently backlit by fluorescent office lights that buzz just loud enough to be annoying on the sound design track. Hindi movies have a terrible habit of wasting veteran actors on exposition delivery systems, and while Nassar tries to give his skeptical cop some actual weight, he is mostly just there to say things like the storm is getting worse and we need to check the records again. The background score tries to compensate for every single moment where the script drops the ball by laying on heavy, pulsing synth bass lines that recall better thrillers made ten years ago in Scandinavia, constantly telling us we should be terrified when we are mostly just confused about who turned the television on.
Time-travel narratives usually collapse because they treat the past as a museum exhibit rather than a messy place where people made bad choices that cannot be fixed with a better vantage point. This movie wants to be a feminist interrogation of domestic regret disguised as a genre puzzle, but it keeps getting distracted by its own complicated machinery, rushing past the emotional fallout of an accidental death to get to the next plot twist. When you compare it to something like Anurag Kashyap's own earlier work in Gangs of Wasseypur, the looseness here feels manufactured rather than organic, like a cover band playing a complicated jazz record note-for-note without any of the sweat that made the original dangerous. The television screen flickers, the storm outside the London window gets louder, and you realize you stopped caring about the boy's survival about twenty minutes before the credits finally arrive to put everyone out of their misery.