LSD 2: Love, Sex Aur Dhokha 2 (2024) Review!!

Synopsis – Complexities of modern relationships and self-discovery in the high-tech age are explored through interconnected stories of love, friendship, and identity.

My Take – Back in 2010, riding high on the former wave of found footage successes seen in the west, director Dibakar Banerjee (Khosla Ka Ghosla, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!) delivered three stories centered on a honor killing, a MMS scandal and a bunch of sting operations in an anthology about a newly digitizing India.

And despite the absence of any stars and happy endings, the film proved to be a commercial success. Launching the careers of now recognizable faces like Rajkummar Rao, Nushrat Bharucha, Amit Sial and Anshuman Jha.

Now 14 years later, director Dibakar Banerjee and producer Ekta Kapoor are back with a spiritual sequel which follows the same rules. Three ugly stories about sexuality and celebrity, with all the action mediated through cams, mobile and PC screens, VR headsets and the looming arrival of AI.

But, unfortunately, despite its unique premise which aims to capture the essence of modern-day struggles in the age of social media, the film ends up falling short, resulting in a tedious experience.

Simply told, it is an exhausting watch, with all three narratives struggling to sustain interest or engagement. From a convoluted screenplay to crass dialogues, director Banerjee and Eeb Allay Ooo! (2019) co-writers Prateek Vats and Shubham are just unable to efficiently translate the potential of the premise, leaving viewers bewildered and fatigued to follow the disjointed plot-lines.

In a time, where cinema around the globe are releasing various effective projects focusing on the impact of social media on human psychology, this one struggles to add anything important.

Repeating the three-part interlinked structure of its predecessor, the first story, Love (Like), follows Noor (Paritosh Tiwari), a transwoman, who aspires to be an acclaimed actress, navigating the pitfalls of a reality show called Truth Ya Naach, which requires her to put her life under the public spotlight.

Going on and off camera, to garner higher ratings, the show, hosted by Mouni Roy and the judges’ seats filled by Sophie Chaudhry, Tusshar Kapoor and Anu Malik, even reunited her with her estranged mother (Swaroopa Ghosh), who is still averse to accepting her altered sexual identity.

The second story, Sex (Share), follows Kulu (Bonita Rajpurohit), a third-gender character, who works on the cleaning team at a privately run Metro Rail station in Delhi, and finds herself struggling with the consequences of being who she is when she is found badly bruised and sexually abused.

Though, her supervisor, Lovina Singh (Swastika Mukherjee), a single mother, feigns sympathy for her, under mounting pressure from the management, she is struggling to control the damage and the negative publicity the company has been receiving.

The third story, Dhokha (Download), follows Shubham Narang (Abhinav Singh), a pimpled, hormonal 18-year-old YouTuber who is known as Game Paapi in the virtual world and is obsessed with subscriber counts. Prone to cussing and bullying younger children at school, a new mysterious fan manifests his free fall into alternate reality, particularly after sharing a video of Shubham apparently have sex with another man, which causes him to unravel.

Indeed, the film is a strange experience. It may be a unique attempt but on the face of it, it is just an extremely tiring and exhausting watch that doesn’t offer much in the name of stories based in the age of social media and digitization.

It’s playful to a fault, but it also treads the shaky line between bitter and indulgent. The film aims looks at the dark web from the Queer eye, trying to present how the attachment to the cameras has affected a certain community and Gen Z.

The approach is refreshing but the writing isn’t. The stories shown seem dated, especially Noor and Kullu’s stories. In an age where there are several real-life cases of people going to any extent on reality shows to get likes, Noor’s story feels predictable. And nearly all the videos from viewers about her are unnecessarily dismissive or homophobic.

The same goes for Kullu and her acceptance, we takes a long time to get through. Leaving the only bold sequence for the end when the only Muslim character in the film gets lynched. The topic is refreshing, no doubt, and packed with several elements, like how a lower wages transwomen has to deal with office politics.

But while the third story did hold onto my interest especially how it brings in the elements of the influencer culture and meta-universe. It loses steam as it heads towards the end. In some moments, the film raises good questions, some playful, others pointed, even profound, about a world in which fake, nearly always, trumps fact. But since we know the three principal characters in the film will fail, mostly at their own expense, the experience just isn’t worth it.

But while the film falls short on the writing, the performances somewhat works in the film’s favor. Paritosh Tiwari, Bonita Rajpurohit and Abhinav Singh are indeed excellent, and excellently supported by Swastika Mukherjee, who delivers yet another memorable turn, and Piyush Kumar.

Urfi Javed is likable in a small role, while Mouni Roy, Sophie Choudry, Anu Malik and Tusshar Kapoor deliver the necessary over-the-top acting. On the whole, ‘LSD 2: Love, Sex Aur Dhokha 2’ is a chaotic anthology letdown by its terrible execution and convoluted approach.