Ohh My Dog Review: Pankaj Tripathi Film Is Fun, Gripping And Charming

Why do we dog out the dogs that roam our streets and neighbourhoods? That is the question that writer-director Amit Rai poses in Ohh My Dog, his third film. Don't these four-legged creatures, he asks, have the right to exist in peace?

By way of an answer, Rai crafts an entertaining film that centres on two adventures - yes, two separate adventures - that play out parallelly over a single day in two different cities, one in Assam, the other in Bihar.

The unrelated stories involve a sharp-witted Dibrugarh schoolboy whose pet goes missing and a street-smart mutt in Patna whose human companion, a young construction worker, is kidnapped.

It is a dog-eat-dog world out there and courage and quick thinking are of the essence. The child summons up all his resolve and intelligence and the canine its innate animal instinct to push back against those that have caused them distress.

The two strands of Ohh My Dog are somewhat randomly stitched together but they add up to a fervent and coherent plea for human-animal coexistence. This is a movie with a big heart that celebrates man's best friend like no other Bollywood film since Tere Meherbaniyan (1985) has done. It is, therefore, easy to cut it some slack.

With two storylines that do not intersect at any point, the film is obviously unconventional in terms of structure. It is also unusual because the only star in the cast - Pankaj Tripathi - plays a secondary role in one of the two plots.

Tripathi is cast as a Patna mathematics teacher who comes to the aid of a dog's dogged mission to locate an impoverished daily wage earner who has vanished without a trace from a construction site supervised by building contractor Maqdoom (Shreedhar Dubey).

The local police inspector (Rajesh Kumar) stonewalls all attempts to file an FIR. It is left to the poor dog separated from its human pal to do its own sleuthing. The stray sniffs its way around like a pro and does what the police won't.

Another disappearance, this one in Assam, triggers a serious crisis in the life of Apu (debutant Maahi Rai). The character's name isn't a coincidence. A Satyajit Ray portrait and a Sonar Kella poster adorn the walls of his home.

His alarmed mother (Geeta Agrawal Sharma), aware of what her son's pet, Momo, means to him, heads out to a police station to lodge a "missing dog" complaint.

The distraught Apu tags along. From the conversation that his mom has with SHO Mohammad Abu Hazari (Vijay Mishra), the boy figures out that Momo is in grave danger and he can ill afford to waste any time.

With his private tutor (Sulakhyana Baruah in her first Hindi film) in tow, Apu, like a pre-teen, small-town Feluda, begins an investigation of his own using his powers of deduction.

The nerdy Apu is the protagonist of the film. He isn't the only one though. Oscar the dog, playing Oscar the dog, is the top dog, a rebel with paws. It is one among a cast of countless canines, but it has the sort of screen time that could be the envy of a Bollywood A-lister.

The stray - it has a damaged foreleg, a colourful ribbon tied around its neck, and an unflappable demeanour befitting a hero - has as much footage as Maahi Rai, a child actor who manfully carries the film on his shoulders.

The Mahabharat is evoked. It is stressed that the epic opens and ends with a dog. The fiercely devoted Oscar is like Yudhisthir's loyal stray. Mythic allusions and rituals, both aural and performative, are thrown in for good measure as the dog looking for his master is literally trapped in a chakravyuh in the course of its search.

The cops, barring one, are punching bags. The protectors of the law are hand in glove with the criminals responsible for the two disappearances. But not so Akaljeet Singh (Pavan Malhotra), a grouchy old man in uniform who throws his lot behind Apu and his private tutor.

Ohh My Dog is a fun film, gripping and charming. Along the way, it touches upon solemn, heavy-duty issues - poverty, child labour, smuggling of dogs for their meat and trafficking of humans for their organs - but it does not stray from its primary intent. The double narrative underscores why humans and animals should be allies in a world in need of healing.

A minor quibbles: it could have been 10 to 20 minutes shorter. Some moments in the tale amount to more bark than bite and could easily have been left out of the final cut.

To its credit, Ohh My Dog isn't mawkish. It goes about its task without ever degenerating into mush. It is the simplicity of its storytelling and the straightforward arcs of the two stories ensure that film never loses sight of its primary purpose.

The dog tends to steal the show - the film is as much about the four-legged star as about anybody else in the cast. Maahi Rai is terrific as the obdurate boy with a mind that never stops ticking. Sulakhyana Baruah, too, makes a strong impression.

Watch the film if you love dogs and especially if you don't.