Dhootha follows a successful journalist’s life turning upside down as newspaper clippings keep finding their way to him, carrying prophecies and depictions of events as they unfold and often before they do, with a horrifying accuracy. The series is currently streaming on Prime Video.
Story
Dhootha follows Sagar, the Chief Editor of a new newspaper called ‘Samachar’. Popular and an idol to many, he’s a corrupt journalist.
His life is turned upside down when he finds a newspaper clipping at a dhaba that contains a prediction of his dog dying with the exact time of death. Soon, the exact thing happens in front of him.
Later, his old friend and now an enemy, popular journalist Charles kills himself in front of Sagar, holding a newspaper clipping depicting his suicide with extreme accuracy.
This throws Sagar into a whirlwind as he begins investigating these newspapers and involves a corrupt policeman who kills an innocent man after Sagar pays him to beat the truth about the accident that killed the dog.
Police Detective Kranthi gets on the case and eventually finds out the connection between policeman Ajay Ghosh and Sagar, as well as the death of Charles and the driver Koti.
Meanwhile, Sagar loses his daughter to a freak accident described exactly by one newspaper beforehand. Ghosh also dies. Sagar makes a breakthrough discovery and learns the source of his misery to be paranormal.
Kranthi gets evidence against Sagar as he asks for her help in protecting his wife Priya and unborn kid. He tries killing himself to save them but realizes it won’t work, at which point he asks the paranormal entity for the solution.
He confesses his sins to the public at a convocation speech and kills the corrupt politician he has been working with for so long.
The ghost of the principled journalist Satya Murthy finally departs as Sagar is imprisoned and Priya dodges near death, as Dhootha season 1 concludes.
Performances
Naga Chaitanya is remarkably bad as Sagar here. A character who should be one of the most fascinating parts of the story given how many shades are there to his character and personality, is wasted on Chaitanya.
The dialogue delivery is awful pretty much across the board, and it’s somehow made worse by the ADR.
Prachi Desai is charming as Amrutha and tries her best but she can do so much with awful writing.
Parvathy Thiruvothu is among the few cast members to deliver an authentic and believable performance.
Priya Bhavani Shankar delivers distressed dialogues with the urgency and believability of a non-actor.
Positives
Dhootha is structured pretty well and the pacing is fine too, for the most part. The deaths are unforgiving and absolute.
The atmosphere created by the constant and heavy downpour is sometimes very effective. It’s also impressive that the show juggles so many characters and does a largely good job at it.
Though predictable, the procedural nature of the police investigation, or that of the main character, doesn’t become a slog.
Negatives
This long runtime for each episode in an eight-episode affair is totally unwarranted. This could be competently told within way fewer installments.
What was the point of Kiran Reddy when all her findings and the meeting with Ravi could’ve easily been something that Sagar did himself? Better yet, he could’ve gotten all that paranormal evidence from Charles himself.
Amrutha’s end feels disrespectfully abrupt and confounding. Even if she feels crushed by the guilt of her adultery, why would she kill herself over it and ask Tapas, an extremely abusive husband who just killed her unborn baby, to avenge her death?
The performances are really poor, with only a few from the supporting cast managing to deliver facial expressions and dialogues that feel like they’re from professional actors.
The dialogues are written really weirdly as well, confusing one as to why when characters speak in English, they do so to just make redundant statements.
The awkward repetition of what they said in another language is hilariously bad. This happens throughout Dhootha.
The paranormal nature of the events is predictable from the start, and so is the backstory of a principled journalist wronged by others which ultimately drives him to seek revenge, even after his death.
Foreshadowing is ruined as soon as Priya is shown to explicitly announce her help in covering up the horrific killings of innocent children, and that her death would remain inevitable even if Sagar dies is something that the audience knows from the very start.
Perhaps that is the point that the makers want to make. Maybe the audience figures out what will happen before the main character because of his incompetence and lack of investigative rigor as a journalist.
However, that would be lending too much credibility to Dhootha‘s writing which is otherwise just consistently bad and overtly predictable.
Verdict
Dhootha is a paranormal thriller that does get some beats right but remains largely a weird concoction of bad writing, poor dialogues that are delivered even poorly, and a bloated runtime.
Dhootha
Director: Vikram K Kumar
Date Created: 2023-12-01 12:30
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