Dobaaraa Review - Only 2 Out Of 12 People Will Understand This Time Loop Mystery

Anurag Kashyap and Taapsee Pannu copy-paste Oriol Paulo's Mirage in Dobaaraa only because they think that people cannot afford Netflix subscriptions. Mirage is not even a half-decade old and yet it has to get a frame-by-frame remake in Bollywood.. what a dilemma! And moreover, it has to get a theatrical release when almost every single big-budget Bollywood movie is failing at the box office. Being a remake of Mirage, Dobaaraa was supposed to be complex, but not like this and for the Indian audience. When people watch Mirage, or for that matter, any foreign language thriller, they assume it to be great, and this league hardly includes a theatre-going audience. In Indian thrillers, the audience expects a slice of entertainment, which is missing in Dobaaraa. It is slow, dark, intense, and wistful, but how much! It puts you into a complete bleakness for 2 hours, even if you haven't seen the original Spanish flick. In the end, hardly 2 out of 12 people understand what it was, supposing that there will be 12 people in the auditorium.Copying the same data from Mirage, Dobaaraa is a scene-to-scene remake with hardly a few changes in the characters. Antara Bhatt (Taapsee Pannu) wakes up one morning and finds that her daughter is missing. During the search process, she finds out that she is stuck in a time loop and has arrived in a different time dimension. She learns that she has an opportunity to save the life of a 12-year old boy who witnessed a death during a thunderstorm which happened 25 years ago, by getting connected through the television set during a similar storm in the present. She meets DCP Chandan Yadav (Pavail Gulati) during the investigation and then he starts helping her. It's later revealed that they had some connection in the past and that this meeting was no coincidence. But what's the connection? Dobaaraa unravels the mysteries in the climax, which you'll have to see for yourself, in case you missed the original on Netflix.The performance of Taapsee Pannu is fulfilling if we avoid comparisons with Adriana Ugarte. Taapsee has done really well in some emotional scenes and some transformation scenes. The transformation here means the same character being in different dimensions, i.e, her specs look and physical changes. Pavail Gulati looks handsome as DCP, but the core of his character is damn too loose to create sympathy among us. However, his performance is honest, and one can't blame him for the writer's fault. It's been quite a while since we saw Rahul Bhat on screen, as he is very choosy with his roles, and Dobaaraa proves again why. Alvaro Morte (The Professor from Money Heist) played an underwhelming role in the original and yet managed to look overwhelming. Rahul Bhat does exactly the same here. In the supporting roles, Himanshi Choudhry, Saswata Chatterjee, Nassar, Sukant Goel, Madhurima Roy, Nidhi Singh, and Myra Rajpal are decent to pretty good.Dobaaraa is stuck in its own timeline, just like Taapsee's characters. It keeps repeating the same formulas of time loop and time dimensions, which have started to look old nowadays. One of the biggest issues with time loop thrillers is that most of them fail to explain why the time loop happened and why only with the protagonist. Mirage didn't explain what the lightning had to do with the time loop, nor does Dobaaraa have any theories to back that up. Half of the film is lost there, and the rest of the half is lost in finding the logic behind why the entire fictional thing took place in real people's lives. Anyhow, it becomes a motiveless film as the outcome is nothing but a simple love story goofed up with unrealistic time dimensions and stretched narrative. Nonetheless, the technical aspects of the film do hold your attention for a while.Making a film like Dobaaraa is no big deal for a director like Anurag Kashyap. He has done it in the past too. His No Smoking is still a mind-shaker for many people in today's time. Dobaaraa, on the other hand, is not at that level. Maybe the timing and remake factor (especially in the current stream of Bollywood) make things difficult for Dobaaraa. His intention was to make a complex mystery, and he does that. However, he completely ignores the normal audience for that. Dobaaraa is an intricate watch, but that's not a big issue here. The bigger issue is the lack of motive and logic that so-called movie buffs seek from Indian movies. Overall, another mess of a time loop misses the opportunity of creative work, whereas the box office and mass appeal succumb at level zero, if not below. Those 2 people who understand the film will have a tough time explaining the film to the other 10 people. Skip it to enjoy the original.