Dhadak 2 Movie Review:

I have started to avoid watching the original the night before I go for the remake. It taints the experience. As a reviewer, I can’t assess the remake as a standalone film. To prevent the overnight hangover of the original, I watched Pariyerum Perumal earlier in the week. I know, I am guilty of not catching the film when it first came out. But that’s not the only guilt I felt while experiencing Mari Selvaraj’s poignant telling of a personal tale. The film made all my notions feel hollow. Good art is a mirror to the privileged. Great art makes them afraid of their reflection.

Cast: Siddhant Chaturvedi, Triptii Dimri, Saurabh Sachdeva, Zakir Hussain, Vipin Sharma and Harish Khanna

Director: Shazia Iqbal

Writers: Rahul Badwelkar and Shazia Iqbal

With Dharma Productions’ track record (which includes Dhadak (2018), the expectations from the sequel weren’t much. The dilution begins with the film’s opening quote: “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty,” a line by United States’ third president Thomas Jefferson. A rousing quote, but still cushy when you compare it to Pariyerum Perumal’s opening words against a black screen: “Caste and religion are against humanity.” It’s unflinching, raw and out there. But I guess I understand. While the Mari Selvaraj directorial passed with a U certificate, Dhadak 2 went through 16 cuts of the CBFC scissor. Massy-er the medium, minimal the mutiny.

It's good that director Shazia Iqbal and producers Dharma Productions avoid making the film a frame-by-frame copy. The film is re-aligned if not exactly reimagined. While Pariyerum… was more of a bildungsroman, Dhadak 2 is a love story. Neelesh (Siddhant Chaturvedi), hailing from an oppressed caste, gets enrolled in a law college. Like any other campus, this too is rife with student activism. The Bahujan blue brigade wants Neelesh to be part of their uprising, whereas he wants to focus on his studies. “Padhne aaya hoon ladne nahi (I came to study not scuffle),” he says. He also starts developing a bond with Vidhi Bhardwaj (Triptii Dimri) only to realise that not just love, even kinship is political in this country. He is beaten up, drenched in black muck and urinated on, lest he forget his place in society. Parallelly, there is a serial killer on the loose, who is killing people from the underprivileged caste and showing them as accidents.

Dhadak 2 is miles ahead of its predecessor Dhadak (2018) which was a watered-down remake of the Marathi film Sairat (2016). It is a momentous start for the mainstream Hindi film, a necessary plunge into the caste dynamics of love stories, which have been the USP of Bollywood for decades. But it can go only as deep. In some ways the film repairs the cracks in the original, but all its good parts are still borrowed. Dharma’s aesthetic takes away the raw grittiness of the film. A wedding dance number is shown before Neelesh is bashed and humiliated, diluting the effect. The black indie dog in Pariyerum Perumal, who later comes blue in a dream sequence, is a symbol of Dalit resistance. But here he comes in white, a cuddly, fluffy creature, completely missing the point. Dhadak 2 is faithful to the Tamil original when it comes to the big picture but it misses out on these subtle nuances. Where it improves is in the treatment of its female protagonist. Triptii’s Vidhi is more formed than Anandhi’s Jothi in the original. Vidhi has a voice and she isn’t afraid to shout it out. Triptii’s performance and her past works in films like Laila Majnu (2018), Bulbbul (2020) and Qala (2022), gives a necessary propulsion to the portrayal of Vidhi. A lot of the case for feminism in the film might seem repetitive but it is necessary since caste purity and gender discrimination are two sides of a coin, flipped to determine women’s fate in Indian society.

Dhadak 2 is sharp if not scathing. It’s bold but not biting. It’s a travesty that the Hindi mainstream can only be compared to the Hindi mainstream and by that meter Dhadak 2 takes a huge leap. No Bollywood film in recent memory has taken up the pressing issue of caste so openly. But still, as a narrative, Dhadak 2 can feel disjointed. It shines in scenes and in instances but doesn’t go beyond the sum of its parts. The performances, although competent, too aren’t able to lift the film above what it is. You feel Siddhant’s helplessness, his plight, his rage and his rebellion. Casteist killer Saurabh Sachdeva wearing a cap (an Americanised psychopath tell) is menacing but again far behind the everyman evilness of Karate Venkatesan in the original.

Coming out of a mainstream production house, Dhadak 2 is a forward step towards representation of the oppressed caste on the big screen. I hope it encourages and empowers storytellers to fearlessly tell stories of the marginalised. The film isn’t without flaws but it can be one step in the long ladder of making art that isn’t pretty. It can’t always be a colourful kaleidoscope. We need to see our ugly faces in the mirror.