Dhak Dhak review: An uneven but enjoyable joy ride towards fulfilment and freedom

Ratna Pathak Shah in Dhak Dhak. (Screen grab/YouTube/Viacom18 Studio)

If someone is keeping record, probably thousands of jacketed, ungroomed men make the annual journey from Delhi to Leh on motorcycles tuned to wake up sleeping villages and sedate deodars. It was a novel concept, decades ago, but the environmental strain these Instagram-inspired pilgrimages have put Ladakh under, now makes for resoundingly poor dystopian anxieties. If you’ve been on this route any time of the year, you’d probably have spotted heavily armoured men meandering through traffic, seeking enlightenment and whatnot. But when four women decide to take the same journey, their flaws, their burdens and their unshackled selves yield pleasantly different results. Dhak Dhak is essentially a feminist road trip, that though it doesn’t alter the outlook about necessary journeys that feel like ordeals, does offer a satisfying companion piece to the more masculine notions of that over-abused term – ‘wanderlust’.

Ratna Pathak Shah, Dia Mirza, Sanjana Sanghi and Fatima Sana Sheikh star as women seeking agency, dignity, redemption and perspective in a film that plays it by the book before amending it with a brand-new chapter. Sheikh plays Sky, a rowdy but self-willing influencer, carrying a traumatic recent past. Sky makes videos about automobiles, predominantly bikes. When challenged to produce content which is ‘rooted in a story’, she chances upon the grandmother of an acquaintance – the electrifying Ratna Pathak Shah, as the Punjabi widow Mahi. Mahi has recently won a motorbike in a lucky draw but rather than celebrate, she finds herself piled under the ignominy of burdening her uninterested daughters and their equally apathetic husbands. She learns to ride, subsequently beeping on Sky’s radar. The two decide to take a trip to Khardung La, the highest motorable road in the world, to serve the twin purpose of content and contentment.

Joining Sky and Mahi on the trip are Uzma (Mirza) and Manjari (Sanghi). While the former is suffocating in a toxic marriage, the latter reels from under-confidence stemming from the overprotective nature of her single mother. The backstories are amiably distinct, if stereotypical. Not much is provided in the way of a nuanced ledge here but the leap itself feels cheerily relatable. Most of us who lead embattled, unremarkable lives, seek and probably construct similarly unremarkable solutions. These women are cinematic types, but it allows them to become beacons for the other’s loss of hope. It’s convenient but also gives the fourfold nature of a plot a certain symmetry. The four team up, bond, quarrel, confess and make-up on a journey of several ups and downs. There are some charming soft touches, like Manjari’s interaction with a surprisingly helpful truck driver and Mahi’s spicy entanglement with a foreigner.

Directed by Tarun Dudeja, Dhak Dhak can feel raw and overtly sentimental at times. Scenes can linger for far too long, whereas certain roadblocks – literal and metaphorical – can feel like uninspired bumps. A lengthy, uninteresting conversation around orgasms feels forced rather than earned. The gender-agnostic nature of the perilous journey can at times feel like a formulaic social media project as well. Moreover, the imagery, the yawning endlessness of it, the shallow learnings it represents, crowd the film’s last leg as it begins to hyperventilate at the sight of impending life-affirming choices.

Physical, mental and emotional challenges mount, as erratic, unspecific encounters become the conduit for each character’s breakthrough moment. Not all of it lands, especially an odd breakaway sequence in which Sky hounds the female in-charge of a monastery, for some petty footage. You’d think there’d be a lesson here about the voyeurism of her vocation, but the script takes another unconvincing route altogether.

That said, the performances, especially that of Mirza and Pathak – the experienced members – are remarkably efficient. Shah, though rough-edged in her use of the Punjabi accent, is blissfully unhinged. She ties everything together in the kind of sweeping display of performative conviction that can elevate just about anything, anywhere on the earth.

Dhak Dhak isn’t perfect, nor is it by any stretch of the imagination ingenious. But the fact that it chose to trace a muscular routine we have only seen through the eyes of rowdy, silencer-blasting men on mutually shared roads, makes it a welcome, if obvious antithesis. More so because these women though they bicker and come close to disengaging with the trip of their lives return out of compassion. There is an actual sense of sisterhood here that manifests as malleable respect as opposed to stolid envy. It’s a film that is absolute in its assumptions, crowd-pleasing in its assertions but also enjoyably open in its implications. The journey may well be distinct, the destination, a functionally elusive parallel life that most can no longer make, because of how far down the tunnel they have already looked, but there is something eminently likeable about watching spirited women get to where they wanted to go, and some more. Dhak Dhak might not be dense, or even proficient at utilizing the visual and emotional instruments at its disposal, but it does dispense humour, entertainment and troves of wet-eyed joy.

Dhak Dhak released in theatres on October 13, 2023.