1 Star (out of 4)

Watch LSD 2 on Netflix

Filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee has made some excellent movies. LSD 2: Love, Sex aur Dhokha 2 isn’t one of them.

Like Banerjee’s 2010 film Love, Sex aur Dhokha (“Love, Sex and Betrayal“), LSD 2 consists of three stories that slightly overlap, shot using camera equipment and effects that aren’t typical of feature filmmaking. In the sequel, those formats include things like a reality TV show, online meetings, and Twitch streaming.*

This style of storytelling lost me from the opening minute and never won me back.

LSD 2‘s first story centers around a reality show called “Truth or Dance” that is a combination of Big Brother and So You Think You Can Dance, but with a romantic angle (I’m not sure what the Indian equivalents of these shows are, if any). The film’s audience is dropped right into an episode of the show, complete with on-screen graphics and flashbacks to earlier episodes. It takes time to get used to the visual format, let alone make sense of what’s happening on the show.

In the fake show, contestants vie for points based on how compelling viewers find their stories. They’re encouraged to be on-camera as much as possible, whether they’re having sex with a fellow contestant or fighting with them. They periodically stand in front of a judging panel and either answer a question truthfully or perform a dance with their partner.

The show premise sounds absurd when written out. That’s a huge problem, considering that LSD 2 doesn’t merely tell a story about a fictitious reality show but tries to recreate the experience of watching a reality show. The “Truth or Dance” segment is shot using all the angles and techniques a competitive reality show does, and there are even cutaways to a YouTube channel where a content creator gives tips for audience members who can bet on the show’s results.

Such devotion to authentically recreating the viewing experience puts the “Truth or Dance” segment into an uneasy space where it feels less realistic than if it had been told in a more observational manner, a la a behind-the-scenes TV series like Sports Night. I could believe the segment more easily if it was about a ridiculous reality show rather than trying to convince me that I was watching a ridiculous reality show.

I say “ridiculous reality show” as a reality TV fan. By making “Truth or Dance” so absurd, Banerjee and co-writers Prateek Vats and Shubham seem to sneer at the very idea of reality shows. This attitude winds up influencing and overshadowing the character arc of the segment’s protagonist, a mercurial trans woman named Noor (Paritosh Tiwari).

One of the main characters in the second segment is also a trans woman. Kullu (Bonita Rajpurohit) is assaulted on her way home from her job working as a cleaner at a metro station. The details of the case present a problem for her employer, and her fickle boss Lovina (Swastika Mukherjee) deals with it though a series of Zoom meetings and video calls. The story overall is better than the first segment, but a fictional Zoom call can only be so exciting.

The final segment follows a teenage Twitch streamer who goes by the name “Game Paapi” (Abhinav Singh). In the middle of a stream, his feed is hacked by a convincing deep-fake video of him having gay sex. His insistence that the video is fake drives his popularity in a direction he doesn’t want, taking a toll on his mental state.

The performances overall are fine, but they are overshadowed and interrupted by the format. In every segment, scenes jump from YouTube videos to cable news to man-on-the-street footage to Zoom calls. It’s a commentary on the short-attention spans of the digital age, but with an important difference. In real life, I control what I’m watching and when I switch between mediums. LSD 2 feels more like turning over the TV remote to your fidgety father-in-law as he randomly flips between a Chicago Cubs game, She’s All That, and Road House, then asks you to explain what’s happening.

*I’m using the brand names whose formats are being mimicked (Twitch, Zoom, YouTube) for the sake of simplicity, but the movie invents fake brand names for all of them except Metaverse.

Links

• LSD 2 at Wikipedia
• LSD 2 at IMDb
• LSD at Wikipedia
• Sports Night at Wikipedia
• My review of Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!
• My review of Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar