FANTASIA24 REVIEW: Dead Dead Full Dead [20XX]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 110 minutes
Director(s): Pratul Gaikwad
Writer(s): Pratul Gaikwad

Let’s ask the crazy woman how she died.

When Mr. Patil (Abhijeet Chavan) is prescribed a book for his unexplained, electrified Vulcan salute hand ailment, you can’t help but squint your eyes in confusion. When he rips a page out of the book, crumples it into a ball, and swallows it like a pill, you realize writer/director Pratul Gaikwad isn’t simply being weird with Dead Dead Full Dead. He’s gone full-on absurd. It’s therefore nice to get that first example so early. We’re able to understand the tone and stop ourselves from taking things too seriously. Because anyone who does will miss out on just how insane this murder mystery gets.

The victim: Swastika Mukherjee’s Era. To listen to her try and fool the demonic bureaucrat saddled with completing her paperwork on a space craft orbiting a distant planet (rendering Hell wouldn’t be as much fun) is to believe she’s an astrologist. To hear her husband (Ashwin Mushran’s Rahul) and number one suspect tell it, however, she was easily bored and prone to fixate on whatever new obsession came her way—even if it does so as a random non sequitur from the last one regardless of her spending any time on it first.

So, it’s no surprise when out-of-their-depth constables (and lovers) Balram (Yug Italiya) and Zubi (Monica Chaudhary) enter the crime scene to find no one realizes Era is dead despite her body lying face-down in the middle of the living room. Rahul thought she was just pretending (as she had mere hours earlier for an Instagram reel) and their servant Chotu (Sachin Vidrohi) is too busy filling balloons at her instruction to decorate the apartment for that evening’s eclipse. Only the neighbor across the hall (Flora Jacob’s Basanti Bachhan) cares enough to do something, but she’s addled with dementia and hardly an expert eyewitness.

The film is thus a farce from start to finish as Balram and Zubi attempt to find answers. He does so to prove he can. She does it because she’s caught rummaging through the deceased’s closest … by the deceased. Yes, Era gets to be a witness to her own death, albeit a hostile one. So hostile that whenever the police officers finally get someone talking about what happened (transporting themselves into the memory to better understand the situation), she ends up pissing them off to the point where they end up being the ones holding the knife.

Guilty consciences aside, becoming the murderer in their imagination is hardly an efficient way of finding the real culprit. Unless, of course, they actually did do it. But that’s impossible. As impossible as Era giving her afterlife warden the slip to return to Earth and wreak havoc. So, don’t take anything at face value. Gaikwad is in this to throw curve balls and they come fast and often. Add a pet goat who may or may not be dead, a clandestine revolutionary, and a disgruntled Mr. Shah and the whole ordeal becomes one big distraction. Era might therefore be the only person who can truly say what happened, but she’s having too much fun to tell.

Dead Dead Full Dead is a lark that doesn’t try to be more. We’re in it less to find the murderer’s identity than we are to see what wild event will occur next. It’s all a setting for Balram and Zubi’s latest love spat too as she’s constantly egging him on (being that he refuses to forgive her for an overblown misunderstanding) while he keeps angrily biting off more than he can chew to prove his smarts. But none of these characters are smart. They’re all “duffers” caught in an unexplainable circumstance that they easily accept as shocking yet normal. So, we do too. No matter how far-fetched the next curve ball, it’s played poker straight.

Maybe we’ll get our answers. Maybe none of it matters as long as Balram and Zubi escape with tempers erased. Because the one thing treated like more than a speed bump getting in the way of selfish desires is their romance. Era’s corpse is merely an obstacle preventing everyone from doing what it was they planned to do that night. But maybe it’s also the excuse for these two silly creatures to realize life is too short for petty arguments. They haven’t even been together long enough to want to kill the other yet. That’s when you know the love is real.