Direction: Samir Soni
Producers: Sanjay Suri and Samir Soni
Cast: Sanjay Suri, Nora Fatehi, Pitobash Tripathy
Hindi | Thriller | 95 Min | India | 2018
Sometimes the trailer does make more sense than the film itself. Don’t take me for being mean but that is just the case with Samir Soni’s debut film, My Birthday Song. Quite honestly, there is only so much thrill you can bear. For if in the name of thrills, all you get is a lot of confusion and frequent moments of ‘what’s-going-on-and-why-am-i-here-?’ kind of feeling throughout its duration of 1 hr 35 minutes you can be reasonably certain Soni’s effort isn’t going anywhere.
In fact, that is just the problem with the film. It doesn’t go anywhere. Even a thriller has to see movement of some sort – either forward or backward but if a plot just loops itself around itself – like Carr coiled around Mowgli, the man cub (of Jungle Book fame) with nothing but ‘Look at me, just loooook at me’ as audience you just want to get up and leave, except that call of duty allows you no relief!!
Samir Soni’s ‘thriller’ is nothing but adman Rajeev’s (Sanjay Suri) attempt to figure out why he is having nightmares by giving ghoulish looks to his psychiatrist in order to figure out his life’s mystery. He dreams of having accidentally murdered Sandy (played very woodenly by Nora Fatehi - a girl with whom he had a one night stand some years ago) on his 40th birthday night. She has gate crashed his party along with a close friend and after everyone’s gone home, they head for the bed – only to have Sandy crash into a piece of furniture and die on the spot.
If the film had progressed from that point on to some semblance of what their actual relationship is, Soni’s debut would have been bearable - instead it just spirals downwards into utter chaos. The film’s timeline gets chaotic for the plot moves backwards instead of forward. In other words, after the murder post birthday, Rajeev starts to relive his birthday from the morning prior – which means its endless birthday greetings from family, friends, relatives and colleagues and he knows in advance what the day will bring eventually. So he calls up his friend and warns him not to bring Sandy over to the party because he knows that she will die during the night. Instead, he goes to meet her at her hotel and ends up murdering her in the hotel room. Confused with a Capital ‘C’. Me too! For how can a woman turn up at a party late evening when she has died during the day?
Perhaps Soni and his writer Vrushali Telang, his screenplay writer, can explain it better. All I can say is, the film’s certainly not worth your time. It certainly wasn’t mine. Suri, who has hitherto been part of real sensible cinema like My Brother Nikhil should have known better than to invest in this one as a producer and Soni should stick to his acting.