DNA movie review: Interesting premise marred by an overly melodramatic narrative

2/5

Story: Six-year-old Dhruv is the apple of the eye of his doting parents Akash and Nakshatra. All is well until one day the happy family is summoned at the hospital the boy was born at, following an allegation that two boys born on the same day were swapped shortly after birth.

Review: If you search the internet for stories of babies switched at birth, you’d be amazed at the sheer number of such cases. The Kannada movie DNA, directed by Prakashraj Mehu, finds its inspiration in one such tale. In the film, the happiness of two families is torn to shreds when it emerges that the boys they’ve raised and loved for six years had been exchanged shortly after birth. Dhruv grows up as an only child in an upper middle-class family, while Dev becomes the youngest of three children for a lower middle-class family. Will the parents value the bond they share with the children they’ve raised more or will blood trump it all?

On paper, DNA has a very interesting premise. It is in the narration that filmmaker Prakashraj Mehu falters. Babies being switched at birth by accident wasn’t juicy enough apparently, so he decided to bring in a twist of a deliberate switch to cause hurt to one party in particular. And herein lies the problem. Achyuth Kumar, who plays one of the aggrieved parties, is the reason for the mix-up. The flashbacks of him in college and on romantic bike rides are truly laughable. No offence; Achyuth is an amazing actor, but he’s at least a decade or two too old to be a romantic hero.

The film could have also benefitted from some tight editing. At two hours and twenty minutes it is at least an hour too long. There are just way too many scenes to establish how well loved the boys are, how smart they are and so on so forth. A couple of songs could also have been chopped. As the parents at the centre of this mix up, Roger Narayan, Ester Noronha, Achyuth and Yamuna do justice to their roles, but they are let down by the melodramatic narrative. In all honesty, I was bored after a point, and I tried amusing myself by keeping track of the issues in continuity based on Ester’s nail paint colour.

Verdict: How do I recommend a theatrical viewing of a film for which I was the only one at the movie hall I went to? I am going to leave it to you to decide if you want to see this in a theatre, or if you’d rather wait for it to come to an OTT platform, which will allow you to skip ahead to the more interesting bits.