Review: Dream Girl

Release date: September 13, 2019
Running time: 132 minutes
Starring:  Ayushmann Khurrana, Nushrat Bharucha, Annu Kapoor 

Dream Girl is a new Hindi film that tackles issues of loneliness in our connected society.  It is a humorous highbred of Catfish and Sorry to Bother You.  In it, talented but jobless Lokesh (Khurrana) takes a job as a phone companion where he has to impersonate a woman in order to get lonely Indian men to talk to him / her.  Lokesh has an innate talent for this but as the men get more attached to the fake personality over the phone, he starts to have doubts about what started out as a harmless job.  

This film lives and dies by its characters and thankfully they are diverse and interesting.  Khurrana is absolutely a joy to watch; he has so much charisma as both Lokesh and Pooja that you can't help but focus on his character and root for him.  He is put in a variety of humorous, serious, and everywhere in between situations and handles them all perfectly.  There are so many laugh out loud moments that are caused by a perfectly timed line or a funny look!  Additionally, Khurrana should be commended for fully committing to this role when many mainstream Bollywood actors would have considered it too risky for their career.  Thankfully he pulls it off perfectly and I can't wait to see what else he does!  The rest of the cast are also interesting to learn about.  Although Pooja attracts several people to continue calling her, each person calls her for a different reason from a very different place in life.  It is learning all these motivations and the interactions these different characters have with Pooja that drives this movie onward.

As I mentioned, Dream Girl is incredibly funny.  The writing is crisp and entertaining and the various characters in the film are a joy to watch.  Although the film is a comedy, it tackles issues of loneliness in our connected society that you wouldn't expect from a comedy of this type.  These individuals keep calling Pooja because they are missing something from their life, and it is sad to see that these people place so much hope on something that is not real.  This is explored in a humorous manner, but the underlying seriousness of these issues bubbles up now and then.  However, as the characters get more attached and Lokesh tries to extract himself from their advances, the film slightly devolves.  And at the end, when the film tries to tie all these thoughts together, the movie falls flat.  But these should not detract from what is a hilarious and surprisingly deep film. 

Dream Girl is a hilarious and daring film, one that I didn't expect to come out of Bollywood and thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish.  If you want to see something incredibly funny and different, with more to say about society than your average movie, then check out Dream Girl.  

Watch it