In Dobaara: See Your Evil, a perplexingly titled movie that may (hopefully) not be playing in cinemas by the time you read this, a pair of siblings are turned into blundering, blabbering idiots by a haunted mirror.
If the premise sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Dobaara is the official remake of Oculus — a dreadful execution of a good-enough concept by writer-director Mike Flanagan (Hush, Ouija 2), who is also credited as the Bollywood version’s executive producer.
Flanagan’s film was ambiguous about the evil mirror’s origins. It was just there, content in haunting a seemingly happy-go-lucky family’s sense of cognition, turning them into murderers. There was no evident spectre in Oculus, but this changes in Dobaara with a backstory about a late Anglo-Saxon era witch who curses her soul into the mirror.
The mirror bumps off its owners down the centuries, until it lands at a suburban family’s exquisite residence. These are the Merchants: Alex and Lisa (Adil Hussain, Lisa Ray) and their two children Natasha and Kabir (Rysa Sujani, Abhishek Singh).
Dobaara: See Your Evil and Raabta are films that will make you cringe in your seat
Alex is an ‘artist’ — the seemingly lecherous kind who works with upcoming models behind closed doors of his home studio. He is the target of flirtation by a gorgeous model (Madalina Bellariu Ion), an apparition of the witch from before, who flaunts the latest designer gowns with plunging necklines. She coos and coerces him into killing his wife, while jump-scaring the kids at intermittent intervals.
Years later, the siblings grow up into Huma Qureshi and Saqib Saleem (also real-life brother and sister), the latter, freshly released from prison for killing dear dad. Natasha (Qureshi), hell-bent on revealing the mirror’s evil to the world, has set up cameras to capture its villainy. As a safety precaution, she has jerry-rigged a scythe-like blade that will crack the mirror in two if things get out of hand.
The mirror, though, is too intelligent for them. However, neither Flanagan nor Dobaara’s writer-director Prawaal Raman (of Darna Mana Hai) exhibit the skills needed here to keep the audience from yawning.
Dobaara is cheap on scares and aesthetics. Doors are slammed shut before scenes cut and a gong booms to prompt the audience to notice the mirror’s shenanigans. When you do care to ponder, you curse yourself for wasting money on a movie that is happy with its mucked-up copy-paste screenplay, fake-sounding dialogues, mediocre production quality and a general lack of common sense.
Raabta – Equally bad
The second of this week’s unthinkingly titled movies, Raabta is a bummer of a tale about three reincarnated lovers. Sushant Singh Rajput plays Shiv, a young banker in production design-friendly Budapest, who has all the time in world chasing one skirt after another. Like all leading men (who we never see at their day job), he is the quintessential incorrigible rascal with one-night-stand intent.
His better-half (or maybe just a live-in partner) is Saira (Kirti Sanon), a beautiful, parentless girl who owns a chocolate shop … because, well, that is what young contemporary leading ladies do to boost their sex appeal.
Shiv finds himself an unwilling participant in a romantic triangle. Zakir (Jim Sarbh), a liquor baron (and token half-psycho) is almost equally fascinating to Saira. Clearly aware that Zakir is into her, she flirts away with him while Shiv is off on a conference.
It is at this moment that Raabta, which has done nothing for its audience except flaunt a good-looking couple on-screen, loses its sense of narrative tone (the movie lost its sense of story a long time back).
Saira — who has been plagued by nightmares since birth — finds out that she was a warrior princess from an age that mixes Frank Miller’s 300 and Outlander (the film set in Iron Age Norway, not the TV serial). Even back then she was the local beauty, hooking lusty affections from both Zakir and Shiv’s older incarnations.
Almost all of this is the director’s fault. Dinesh Vijan — producer of Being Cyrus, Love Aaj Kal, Cocktail and Hindi Medium now turned director — uninhibitedly throws himself at the mercy of Rajput and Sanon’s allure, and Director of Photography Martin Preiss’s cinematography. Vijan’s bad calls on the convergence of the movie’s two eras and the overall tonal disjunction makes one wish that someone would’ve cut the line on this Raabta 15 minutes into the film.
Published in Dawn, ICON, June 18th, 2017
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