Dobara

Dobara had potential to be a genuinely unsettling psychological thriller, but instead it collapses under the weight of its own confused storytelling and lazy character work. Taapsee Pannu tries her best to inject life into Riya, the escaped mental patient, but she's fighting a losing battle against a script that treats mental illness as a plot device rather than exploring it with any real depth. The premise of an unstable stranger upending a marriage could've worked—we've seen it done brilliantly elsewhere—but here it's executed with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, complete with predictable twists that signal themselves from a mile away. Director Dobara (yes, the film shares the director's name, which tells you something about the production's priorities) wastes the chemistry between Ranveer and Anjali and squanders what could've been tension-filled moments on melodrama instead.

What really sinks this ship is how the film refuses to commit to its own premise. Is it a thriller? A character study? A moral tale about compassion? It wavers between all three without mastering any of them, resulting in a muddled mess that frustrates more than it entertains. The narrative logic falls apart in the third act, plot holes multiply faster than the runtime justifies, and by the end you're left wondering what the filmmakers were actually trying to say. Even the performances can't save material this unfocused, and the ₹0.55 crore box office collection tells you audiences agreed long be