It’s easy to admire a film like Ohh My Dog. I was admittedly thinking of punny headlines like “Paw-some” and “Canine and Able” before the screening. In an age of mainstream storytelling that thrives on social posturing and performative faith, it’s almost strange to encounter a movie about the agenda-less bond between children and dogs. Even grumpy skeptics (like myself) can’t doubt the pup-loving intent of it all. Both bases are covered — one journey features geeky boy Apu’s search for his missing pooch Momo across the underbelly of Assam; one journey features lion-hearted indie Oscar single-pawedly solving the case of his abducted young human Prince across the underbelly of Bihar. I can only imagine the logistics of shooting with kids and dogs in chaotic Indian cities without leaning on visual effects. Not to mention the ‘courage’ of showing cops as the bad guys in both narratives.
The elaborate chases are constructed to cover as many human faultlines as possible: the disenfranchisement of working-class lives, animal-smuggling and organ-trafficking rackets, institutional neglect, the stigmatisation of strays, patriarchy and caste prejudice, complicit adults everywhere. I like that the film is too busy to be preachy about these things; they’re not bullet-points so much as the passing realities of everyday life. (At one point, a labourer’s face lights up when he’s told that his kidnapped son won’t die with one kidney). I also like that the dogs are afforded the commercial-hero tropes of Indian cinema. The film opens with the decorated burial of an old police dog named Senapati; the implication being, Momo and Oscar are brothers separated at birth. All the Mahabharata references aside (including a Kansa-mama-styled uncle played by Pavan Malhotra), Oscar’s search is peppered with devotional anthems, shots of idols and temples becoming his inspiration, slow-mo action sequences, and the money shot of his howl summoning a pack of 200 street-dogs at the dead of night.
The staging of Oscar reclaims the identity of his clan from the slur-coded confines of Indian culture; “kuttey” would probably be an ode to his perseverance, not an insult. In turn, little Apu’s search in Assam is better described as resilient than humane. It asks the viewer — even the ones scared of wild canines — to reconsider their vocabulary of compassion: it is the ‘doggedness’ of love, not the expression of it.
That’s why it’s difficult to admit that Ohh My Dog has a huge pacing and indulgence problem. It may be easy to admire, but by the second hour, it becomes hard to enjoy. I hate to be that critic, but at a whopping 150 minutes, the film is at least an hour too long; it’s like a soulful essay that makes its point in the first two paragraphs and then bides its time with word salad to ‘earn’ that feel-good finish. The story is stretched to the point of no return.
The filmmaking lacks economy; every scene is milked and padded up with extra reaction shots and endless chasing, almost as if the makers just didn’t have the heart to leave anything out on the edit table. Instead of composing one energetic film out of two parallel tracks, it feels like two 75-minute movies that play simultaneously, without any omissions or connective tissue. The inter-cutting between Assam and Bihar defies the purpose of such a structure. One track diverts from the other rather than supplying it. The film often returns to the same moment after spending 15 minutes in the other state. Some of the transitions are self-sabotaging, too. That money shot of Oscar howling to summon his Bihari comrades is inexplicably split into two parts — he howls, the audience anticipates it, the film suddenly cuts to Apu’s Sherlock-esque mission with his teacher, and by the time we return to Oscar’s Avengers-Assemble moment, the dramatic effect of the scene is ruined.
The mythological nods and cultural gimmicks (like local dance forms used as suspense-building devices) are overcooked. The film insists on visually explaining every decision of Apu and Oscar during their quest. As they follow the ‘scent’ of their missing companions, we see two timelines of the same location. A police-car chase in the climax and a dog terrorising a baddie (without biting him) seem to go on forever. You can see the trickery and the convolutions. The film has no reason to inflate itself with so much plot, but it does, almost as a way to show that it’s more than a dog movie. I found myself shuffling in my seat, willing the story to get on with it and stop marinating in its own sweetness.
The cast is fine, across both species. Particularly the screen presence of good boy Oscar, who does a Shah Rukh by sprinting towards danger for much of the film. Maahi Rai’s bespectacled Apu is a nice internet-gen-coded underdog. With the adults (especially Pavan Malhotra), it feels like the characters ad-lib and yell without a specific brief because the camera keeps rolling. I wish the film didn’t feel the need to be so…substantial. It’s eventually undone by its relationship with the very audience it keeps trying to impress. It takes some doing to snatch defeat from the canine-shaped jaws of victory. But Ohh My Dog comes close. It’s still watchable, warm in bits, yet a lesser adventure than it starts out as. My concerns are different, though. I expect a few (human) viewers to come out and berate their own dogs for not being as resourceful and cool as Oscar — the equivalent of parents scolding their kids by comparing them to the school first-benchers. Call it the Sharma-ji-ka-kutta syndrome.