Saibal Chatterjee

Identical twins of the kind that we encounter in Hindi popular cinema are always temperamentally polar opposites. The pair in Do Patti, a Netflix film directed by Shashanka Chaturvedi, is no exception - they look the same but are dissimilar in disposition and demeanour. The film, however, deviates from the larger narrative template that governs the genre. Mumbai movies may have stumbled upon a degree of freedom thanks to the advent of the streamers, but old habits die hard. Do Patti, scripted by Kanika Dhillon, has an old trope at its core. It, however, eschews the usual confusion-caused-by-mistaken-identity construct.

Conjuring up a life that plays out in a virtual space - in other words, setting up a gauzy existence that floats in a dimension far removed from the real and the tangible - has its wages. Vikramaditya Motwane’s inventive, sparky CTRL examines the nature and extent of the toll that burrowing into a rabbit hole of constructed personas and enhanced engagements can extract.

Bhuvan Bam’s Vasant Gawde, Mr. Vardaan to the world owing to his ability to see events before they come to pass, is back seeking to make a killing from the prescient news updates that he receives on a mobile phone app. This time around, the Taaza Khabar protagonist is either on the backfoot or, worse still, down on his haunches. His plight necessitates desperate measures as he faces new challenges hurled at him by a man who will stop at nothing. But the show, notwithstanding a series of dramatic confrontations, struggles to skirt around the pitfalls of an idea that is beginning to wear thin.