Dil Dug Dug karne laga? Well, kinda!

A still from Ritwik Prateek’s comedy mystery satire Dug Dug, which releases in theatres on Friday

As opening sequences go, I don't think I've seen anything trippier than Ritwik Pareek's Dug Dug among desi movies, lately. The film opens in theatres, May 8.

The odd title, Dug Dug, comes from the thumping sound of a heavy motorbike as it audibly announces its presence, navigating the roads it confidently claims to own.

Which is how Dug Dug starts off, with the rural, drunk protagonist, in a dhoti-kurta, setting off on his bike, albeit a Luna - having downed his drinks, satiated his smoke/nicotine urge, at a Rajasthani roadside dhaba, with red-blue lights.

There's a very spaghetti-western feel to it all. And he's just riding, and riding…

This sequence carries on for quite a few minutes, with psychedelic rock, and deep Hindi poetry on life for background score - plus miles of a spotless, deserted highway ahead.

This film's hero, Thakur (Altaf Khan), has no dialogues in Dug Dug. He dies shortly after, in a merciless road accident. What follows is a low-budget, indie movie about religion/faith, based on news, dressed as fiction. It premiered on an IMAX screen at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), back in 2021.

While nobody encourages drunk driving/riding, of course - what Ritwik, 34, tells me he was attempting to achieve with that sequence is that free-as-a-bird sensation, "after you're two-three pegs down", on the road, but under control, yet "up in the air!"

His inspirations ranged from Bajaj Avengers ‘Feel like God' ad (featuring Sidharth Shukla), and the long, dialogue-free ‘Stargate' finale sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, that he'd once watched on YouTube, set perfectly to Pink Floyd's 23-minute track, Echoes.

As it is, he believes the best introductory sequences belong to Easy Rider (‘Born to be Wild'), and Top Gun (‘Danger Zone').

Dug Dug is Jaipur-born Ritwik's debut feature. It somewhat relates to a strangely religious shrine that anybody on the Pali-Jodhpur highway (NH-62) in Rajasthan would've surely stopped by, for a minute, to notice/worship a 350 cc Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycle, parked/placed on a pedestal.

Devotees regularly offer flowers, even bottles of booze for prasad to this Enfield Bullet! For a Rorschach Test, a motorbike with the headlight pointed sideways could well pass off for an animal in the wilds. The motif feels complete.

Legend has it that a young man in 1988 died by accident on that bike, which was seized by cops. Except, that no matter what the cops did to protect/chain the machine - that bike would inevitably disappear from the local police station, and find its way, on its own, back to the accident site. People believe the spirit of the said rider, now known as Bullet Baba, aka Om Banna, resides in that spot, deemed a ‘dham' (sacred abode).

Through this germ of an idea/story, Ritwik builds exquisitely shot, sassily-lit scenes - even if an overstated film, full of stop-motion and montages - on the seamless, universal emergence of a religion/cult.

The lens still isn't overtly cynical, let alone atheistic. In my conversations, Ritwik comes across as a believer himself. I'm sure everybody has a view on religion.

To me, luck equals God. Since we can't explain the former, the latter will always exist. Isn't most of our lives, luck, anyway. Also, what's religion, if not stories we tell ourselves.

Ritwik argues, "I didn't want to get into superstition. We manifest, once we wholeheartedly [subscribe] to a belief system."

That said, he mildly shows how religion can be manipulated by politics, business, inevitably meddling/mediating between faith, and its followers.

At the film festival in Kerala, Ritwik met with Anurag Kashyap who, in turn, brought on board filmmakers Vikramaditya Motwane, Nikkhil Advani, Vasan Bala as executive producers for Dug Dug.

Pretty much the same lot, along with director Kiran Rao had, likewise, lent their names to debutant Karan Tejpal's thriller, Stolen (Prime Video), that had competed at Venice film festival earlier.

I suppose it helps with veteran names backing a film beyond blurbs or festival/critical acclaim on posters.

Kiran had similarly pushed/produced first-timer Aranya Sahay's Humans in the Loop (Netflix) - finest Hindi film debut of 2025 - about AI; exposing the global North-South divide, through the simplest story of a woman and child among the Oraon tribe in Jharkhand.

Dug Dug is just as sweaty, spiritedly indie - own money, self-produced, with locally sourced actors from Rajasthan, and post-production meetings held over Zoom.

Ritwik tells me he read design at NIFT, Hyderabad, and learnt a lot of his filmmaking from Peter Jackson's vlogs and production diaries on the making of Hobbit.

If at all, his debut would've directly dropped, and sunk on an OTT, after premiering at TIFF. So glad, I caught it at a regular, mainstream theatre, which is where it belongs.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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