Dhak Dhak — the sound of freedom written too clean

What works for the film

• Performances—Strong performances, especially from Ratna Pathak Shah and Dia Mirza, work in favour of the film. One is compelled to feel the underlying pain of the elderly woman, retired and lonely, struggling to reclaim her identity, all because it’s portrayed so well by Ratna Pathak. Dia brings a measured, quiet dignity to Uzma, avoiding any temptation to overplay either the subservience or the rebellion. While it’s easy to make ‘a Muslim woman trapped in a patriarchal marriage’ look unidimensional, Dia brings grace to this part. 

• Cinematography—As the protagonists traverse from Delhi to Khardung La, the Himalayan landscapes, winding highways, desert expanses, and high-altitude roads are captured with a sweeping, often postcard-like grandeur.  It surely makes the physical journey feel epic.  However, it does feel too pristine, distant, and cold at times.

• Pressing themes—Women empowerment and feminine solidarity are main themes of the film, explored well. It feels like an emotionally sincere film that aims to do more good than it ends up doing. But a good effort is what counts to start with.

More things work in favour of the film — the unconventional and refreshing premise, optimistic tone, uplifting message, and above all, the intent. All this against the breathtaking backdrops surely takes its audience towards courage, connection, and self-belief.

What Didn’t—

1. Feels episodic—Sequenced Emotional Rhythms (One-After-Another Arcs)

The film gives each protagonist her own mini emotional journey — but these arcs play out one after the other, rather than intersecting or overlapping. This creates a mechanical rhythm:

1. Manjari’s fear -> turning point -> resolution
2. Followed by Uzma’s internal conflict -> phone confrontation -> resolution
3. Then Sky’s angst -> monk’s gyaan -> return and resolve
4. Finally, Manpreet’s quiet endurance -> reaffirmation -> summit moment

Because these arcs are so clearly demarcated, the audience begins to anticipate the pattern: “Now it’s this character’s turn to have her emotional scene.”

If one were to compare the film with another transformational road journey, like Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, where the latter is also episodic but each stop is directly tied to a character’s fear, and their arcs are interconnected. The personal growth of one character has ripple effects on the others. That kind of interdependence is largely missing in Dhak Dhak.

2. Gyaan dispensing devices –

to that effect, an easy gyaan-dispensing device is used in more than one case.

Manjari’s episode with the Truck Driver: When Manjari is scared and questions whether she should have come on this trip at all, a truck driver—a classic gyaan-dispensing device—gives Manjari a boost, not to evolve the story or challenge her deeply. She becomes more confident after this one conversation—almost too conveniently.

Sky’s Walkaway and Return: Sky, frustrated by lack of signal and external validation, lashes out and temporarily abandons the group. A monk, a symbolic mouthpiece, appears for one purpose only: to say something profound and disappear. There’s no emotional resistance, no breakdown, and no messy confrontation with self.  Sky just listens, absorbs, and comes back transformed — as though inner wounds are healed in a single scene.

This exact story mechanism (angst → wisdom → rebirth) has already played out for Manjari and Uzma. So, by the time it’s Sky’s turn, the audience can predict the emotional rhythm. While a gyaan-dispensing device can be used, and has been used in many other films, repeating it more than once in the same story makes a mockery of it.

3. Literal conversations over narrative tension –

Preachy, resolution-in-dialogue scenes are a shortcut that the film takes more than once. While the intent is sincere and the themes are strong, the delivery robs the film of emotional depth and subtlety. It turns moments of potential catharsis into declarations, because of which it feels like flatter character arcs rather than lived experiences of these characters.

For example—a scene where Manpreet and Sky have a discussion over ‘goal vs journey.’ The scene explores—is it more important to reach the destination or experience the path that leads there? It fits the structure of a road movie and reflects each woman’s inner conflict. But the scene plays out overly literally, and characters talk more like writers with little emotional build-up that flows over to the following scenes. It’s a film about a journey. So literally discussing “goal vs. journey” feels like spoon-feeding the theme to the audience, rather than letting it emerge.

The following scene to this, a parallel moment, where Uzma and Manjari are having their own reflective exchange — suffers from the same issue. It feels written to mirror the Sky-Manpreet scene, as if the script is structuring “two emotional beats for balance,” rather than letting the conversations emerge organically. The dialogue here, too, seems to summarize the arc, where Uzma tells Manjari that she doesn’t need anyone’s permission. Again — too easy, too clean, too verbal. Transformation is being declared, not earned.

4. Underdeveloped backstories –

The backstories of the main characters, especially Sky, Uzma, and Manjari, don’t feel fully explored, because they are treated more like plot prompts than psychological realities. We don’t have access to much of the emotions about them to fully experience their journey, emotions like what dreams Uzma gave up before marriage, what pushed Sky towards the space of digital validation, and effectively nothing about Manjari. In Uzma and Manjari’s case, just the characters are set—their current space—and everything else is left to the audience’s general context of such characters.

Perhaps simpler singular scenes from their past/present that hinted at their lived psychological realities would have helped so much more. Just for example—in Uzma’s case, a moment where she fixes a scooter for her son or her applying for a mechanical engineering program in her younger days and being told to give it up for marriage. For Manjari, she overhears her relatives talking about her being such a ‘simple-minded’ girl and how ‘lucky’ she was to have found such a groom.

And these scenes could emerge during real-time group tension. For example, Manjari’s innocence is challenged when Sky/someone accuses her of being privileged, pushing her to open up about her loneliness of being pampered but never respected or trusted.

5. The Gaze on Women’s Stories

While Dhak Dhak is well-meaning and surface-level empowering, it often carries traces of the male gaze — not in overt objectification, but in authorship distance. The film observes what liberation might look like, rather than writing from inside the experience of transformation. Many scenes feel imagined from empathy, not memory — from the outside looking in.

As a result, the story misses the subtler, lived textures of womanhood:

• how patriarchy is internalised, not merely imposed;
• how guilt, shame, sexuality, aging, motherhood, and economic freedom quietly shape women’s choices beneath the slogans;
• how women sometimes police themselves or one another — the unspoken hierarchies of their own conditioning.

All these things take away a lot from the film that has otherwise got many things right, majorly refreshing premise and earnest performances, and had the capability of being truly an outstanding film. Its episodic structure, predictable arcs, and over-reliance on dialogues dilute the impact of a road story.

Dhak Dhak wants to liberate its women, but liberation on screen comes from truth, not intention. When freedom is written as a slogan instead of a struggle, the road feels scenic but never lived in.

— SM