Dwikhondito

Story: Dwikhandito is about a writer suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder and what happens when he gets sucked into the world he creates

Review: Dwikhandito, which is about split personality, can break you so bad that all you do is try to pick up the pieces and move on — run if possible. The ruptures in the flawed narrative show up from the start when a writer, Kaushik, gets sucked into the world he creates through his pen. Strangely, apart from other things, he also imagines a Durga crossing swords with three makeup-gone-wrong Mahisasuras in a scene that looks less powered by computer graphics and more by drug-induced hallucination. The story follows the journey of this man from illness to recovery through the aid of a few characters — an assistant director who becomes a director overnight without budget and also finishes a film in record time, a psychiatrist who spends more time on real shoot locations than a hospital and a wife who is confused whether to love or hate her husband. The story, at the conception level, may have had the potential, as it talks about mental health, the need to reach out to a person with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), but shoddy execution takes the film to a point of no return. Even actors like Saswata Chatterjee and Anjana Basu don’t manage to salvage the situation that’s a bad trip one can’t come out of. Saying the least would be that the film has huge gaps. So, one line goes like, ‘Hotath kore ghorite dekhi doshta baje, tarpor dekhi teente baje, majhe teen ghanta ki korechhi mone nei’. Add to that bad production design and crazy subtitling. The only decent bit about the film team was that it clarified at the start that Dwikhandito had nothing to do with Taslima Nasreen’s autobiographical novel of the same name. That way, it’s one heartbreak less.