‘Dilli Dark’ Movie Review: A Neat Black Comedy with Delhi-Shaped Angst

Director: Dibakar Das Roy

Writer: Dibakar Das Roy

Cast: Samuel Abiola Robinson, Geetika Vidya Ohylan, Shanatu Anam, Dimpy Mishra, Stutee Ghosh, Salim Siddiqui

Language: Hindi

If Mumbai feels too real to be cinematic, New Delhi feels too cinematic to be real. Every life is cursed to be a story; every person sounds like a character. Dilli Dark scrutinises these illusions and fictions of the Indian capital through the lens of an outsider. The outsider is Michael Okeke (Samuel Abiola Robinson), a Nigerian national who is trying his darndest to overcome casual racism, transcend his stereotypical African image as a drug peddler named Kevin, and find a real job with his MBA degree. Ironically, his skin tone is an obstacle in a culture that’s so busy playing victim to the first world and massaging its own brown-person complex that it remains oblivious to the third-world gaze it inflicts upon others. It’s a vicious cycle, but Michael’s 6-year relationship with the city comes to a head when he befriends a coke-addicted godwoman (Geetika Vidya Ohylan).

Despite its relatively heavy and sensitive themes, Dilli Dark dares to be a ‘black comedy’ of sorts. Levity is a luxury in an age where everyone is offended until proven otherwise. But writer-director Dibakar Das Roy invokes his popular namesake — early Dibakar Banerjee — and gives it a good shot. The Delhi quota of quirk features a nosy landlord who accuses Michael of eating human meat, an ill-informed Bengali neighbour who sees Michael as a fellow outcast, a viral Hindi rap song (“Hum kaale hai, dilli-waale hai”) sung by Michael in an effort to belong, a kitty-party-aunty-coded client of the godwoman, a birthday dinner where a drunken Sikh man recognises ‘Kevin’ but is accused of racism (“do all Black people look the same to you?”), a Nigerian woman who smuggles cocaine in her rectum, and a crass podcast host who interviews the most controversial residents of the city. There’s also the playful link to history — where Michael imagines himself as a massy and filmy manifestation of Jamal-ud-Din Yakut, the African-Siddi courtier and alleged lover of Razia Sultan, the only female ruler of the Delhi Sultanate. The film even opens with the man on a horse in a forest, setting the stage for a 21st-century ‘adaptation’ of his life (or a version of black-faced Dharmendra from the 1983 movie starring Hema Malini).

The tone brings to mind Nicholas Kharkongor’s Axone (2019), a bittersweet film about a group of North-eastern migrants in Delhi struggling to cook a traditional dish on the eve of a wedding. The chaos is similar, even if the context is more local and more hostile at once. The prejudice Michael faces is so normalised that, as viewers, we are wired to laugh at the linguistic twangs within the racial slurs rather than the slurs themselves. The constant barrage of “kaalu (blackie)” and “your surname is OK-OK?” is wrapped in the kind of North Indian ignorance that commercial cinema has often weaponised — and glorified — for easy humour. In doing so, the film nicely mines the cultural lexicon of colour in everyday life: black money, black hearts, black magic, black comedy, white lies, dark nights.

The Delhiites are ‘funny’ and Michael is funny for getting frustrated with how shameless they are; the only time they get pissed off is when Michael questions the point of Diwali in a notoriously polluted city. How dare a foreigner doubt their mythology and holy customs? This week-in-the-life-of format humanises a subculture of strivers and aspirants that’s often reduced to broad strokes of drug dealing and petty crime. When his MBA teacher patronisingly advises him to know India better (“what’s our national song?”) if he wants a marketing job, you feel for the spectacle that Michael becomes just by virtue of who he is. His grasp of “thora thora (little little)” Hindi is not enough to convince society that he’s human, not an alien who’s the first suspect for anything awry in the locality. Darkness is such an integral part of the city’s mentality — cult suicides, serial killers, sexual assaults, honour killings — that even a piece of stale mutton in his fridge can trigger their inbred demons. The harder he kicks against his cannibalistic fate, the deeper he sinks.

That’s not to say Dilli Dark doesn’t have its shortcomings. Michael’s lyrical voiceover about Delhi, for instance, remains at odds with the directness of the film. Romanticising the use of masks (“pollution or facelessness?”) and the city’s circular layout is fine, but a messy climax overuses it in a way that puts the maker’s musings — rather than the central character’s — on the screen. It’s a bit of a crutch for stories that lean on words and thoughts when the narrative lacks interiority. The portions in Maa’s ‘ashram,’ too, come across as consciously eccentric, particularly her exchanges with a rich client desperate to be a mother. Michael’s experiences here don’t feel organic, rather a device in a script that’s looking for ways to stay busy. The absurdist pitch dilutes the chemistry between the godwoman and the Nigerian man — both reluctant sellers of ‘products’ to addicts who need them. It leads to a final act that deflates the social focus of the film.

But Dilli Dark also represents the kind of minor-key and vintage indie that’s all but disappeared from the Hindi landscape in the last decade. Back when independent cinema didn’t always need to be gritty (with a capital G) and hard-hitting to fetishise its limited scale. Film-makers like Sandeep Mohan and Srinivas Sunderrajan made movies that straddled a middle ground between cinema and cinephilia, and Dilli Dark unfolds like a chip off that old block. It’s nostalgic in the DIY way it handles locations, stages low-budget surrealism and films the hassled protagonist. It’s almost been willed into existence by a vision that doesn’t use self-seriousness as its calling card. You can sense the spontaneity of a crew that’s both discovering and telling a story.

The performances feel like an extension of this hustle: the choppily dubbed voice of Samuel Abiola Robinson as Michael adds to his dissonance with the place, and Geetika Vidya Ohylan expands a shapeless role that would’ve been a gimmick in a lesser film. There’s a randomness about them that allows Michael to earn the dignity of a tragicomedy. He slowly realises that the average middle-class resident finds false power in the fact that their lives — like the ones in New York and London — can be a seductive idea and privilege for someone else. The climax isn’t executed well, but it suggests that the power cuts in Delhi, too, feel like an indictment of a city that becomes the very darkness that invisibilises those like Michael Okeke. All he can do, then, is not be okay and dream with open eyes.