Aastha Tiku’s 24-minute debut explores privilege, loneliness, and contemporary relationships.
Sofia Ashraf leads a cast featuring Tenzin Dalha and Supriya Joshi.
Dreamboat uses cyberpunk visuals but struggles to sustain its surreal premise.
There is a difference between making a film deliberately strange and making one so consumed by its own strangeness that the audience struggles to find a way in. Aastha Tiku’s Dreamboat, a 24-minute fantasy comedy making its world premiere at the Dharamshala International Film Festival, attempts to build a surreal world around loneliness, emotional attachment and the privileges of South Bombay. It has the visual imagination to make this world interesting, but very little patience for developing the ideas that hold it together. By the time it ends, there is plenty to look at and very little to take away.
The film follows Trish (Sofia Ashraf), a young underground musician who appears to have developed an unusually strong emotional attachment to a pillow. Her life unfolds in a dreamy, somewhat detached world populated by eccentric friends, questionable romantic interests and people who seem to have stepped out of an internet joke. There is Ash (Prayrak Mehta), Samay (Moses Koul), Ish (Supriya Joshi) and Raven (Tenzin Dalha), whose presence brings another version of the performative male personality into the mix. The pillow, meanwhile, becomes the centre of a relationship that the film seems determined to explain through several layers of symbolism.
Tiku appears interested in the absurdity of contemporary relationships, particularly the way young people negotiate loneliness, intimacy and romantic expectations. The film also takes aim at the insulated world of South Bombay privilege, where wealth and social standing exist alongside an apparent obsession with appearing alternative. There are references to underground music, rave culture, therapy and the language of internet relationships. The ingredients are certainly there for a sharp satire. The problem is that Dreamboat rarely knows which of these ideas deserves its attention.
The characters often feel like exaggerated versions of familiar online personalities. Their conversations and behaviour lean heavily on the language of Gen Z culture, with the kind of self-conscious eccentricity that might work as a social media sketch but becomes tiresome when stretched across an entire film. Raven, in particular, comes across as an almost literal embodiment of the performative internet male. The writing relies on recognisable types rather than giving these characters enough personality to exist beyond their references. As a result, the film's satire of a privileged social circle feels rather superficial. It recognises the material but struggles to find anything particularly revealing to say about it.
The pillow is an even bigger problem. It could have been an effective expression of Trish's emotional dependence, offering a physical object through which the film could explore loneliness and the need for comfort. Instead, it is made to carry so many possible meanings that its purpose becomes increasingly difficult to grasp. Is it about romantic attachment, class privilege, emotional insecurity or something more existential? The film appears to be reaching for all of these at once. Its symbolism eventually becomes so crowded that the central idea loses its shape.
There are moments when Dreamboat evokes the magical realism associated with Haruki Murakami, particularly in the way it places an ordinary emotional experience inside an increasingly strange setting. The influence is more apparent in the atmosphere than in the storytelling. Surrealism can be an effective way of approaching subjects that resist straightforward explanations, but it still needs an emotional or narrative anchor. Here, the film keeps introducing new visual and conceptual distractions without giving the audience enough reason to invest in them. Its references to privilege and existential uncertainty feel more like a collection of ideas than a developed argument.
The technical choices add to this problem. The production design deserves credit for creating a distinct world, and the art direction gives the film a recognisable identity. Its South Bombay setting is filtered through a cyberpunk aesthetic, with neon lighting, crowded frames and a heightened sense of artificiality. The camera work is effective in establishing this visual language, and there is an evident effort to make the film look different from the familiar urban short-film landscape. The rave sequence, in particular, leans into the film's intoxicated atmosphere.
However, the visual excess becomes exhausting. The lighting, sound and music compete for attention, leaving very little room for a scene to settle. At just 24 minutes, the film feels surprisingly difficult to sit through. Its pacing is relentless, and the constant shifts in tone make it hard to understand what the audience is supposed to focus on. The film seems to mistake sensory overload for energy. Even when an image is striking, the next one arrives before it has had time to register.
The performances are among the film's more convincing elements. Sofia Ashraf gives Trish a distinct presence, while Prayrak Mehta, Tenzin Dalha, Supriya Joshi and Moses Koul contribute to the film's unusual ensemble. Sarita Chaddha appears as Trish's mother, while Majid Khan plays the butler. Gurpal Singh features as the therapist, adding to the film's collection of characters who occupy this peculiar social world. The cast understands the heightened tone and commits to the material, even when the screenplay gives them little room to develop beyond their initial introductions. The appearance of familiar faces, including Supriya Joshi, also adds some charm to the experience.
One of the more interesting aspects of the film is its treatment of the protective-friend dynamic. The character who might conventionally be written as the friend warning a woman about unsuitable romantic interests is also given space to be desired and placed at the centre of a romantic equation. It is a welcome departure from a familiar screen stereotype, although the film does not explore the idea with enough depth to make it particularly consequential.
Backed by filmmaker Amit Masurkar, known for Newton and Sherni, Dreamboat marks an ambitious directorial debut for Tiku. There is an identifiable visual sensibility here, and the film's willingness to experiment deserves acknowledgement. But experimentation alone cannot compensate for a screenplay that keeps adding ideas without establishing a clear relationship between them. The result is a short that feels much longer than its running time.
Dreamboat is an exhausting watch with flashes of visual imagination. Its performances and cyberpunk-inspired production design offer reasons to stay with it, but the writing never gives its surrealism enough substance. The film wants to say something about privilege, intimacy and the absurdities of contemporary youth culture. By the end, however, its many metaphors have crowded out the story. The viewer is left more intrigued by the world Tiku has created than convinced by what she wanted to say through it.
