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