Dug Dug Review | Ritwik Pareek’s Directorial Debut Questions The Mythmaking Of God And Religion

Ritwik Pareek’s debut film arrives in India five years after its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF ‘21). The film’s trailer and poster, bathed in neon pink and blue, paved the way for its absurdist worldbuilding, punctuated by an editing style that allows its visual comedy to make perfect sense. To explain the premise of Dug Dug (2021) would require contextualising it within the widely-known phenomenon of the “Bullet Baba Temple” situated near Jodhpur, Rajasthan. Picture thousands of people worshipping a motorcycle and offering its shrine countless bottles of alcohol. This is where Pareek found immense inspiration. 

For being one of the largest democracies in the world, India’s relationship with religion is a fraught one—some calling it complete superstition, some calling it a guiding light and the rest, making and watching satirical films about it. Dug Dug rightfully aims to question the mythmaking of god and religion. It also attempts to dissect the phenomenon of how faith is personally and by extension, collectively endured over time. While this description alone sounds quite heavy and bleak, the film ensures to tickle your funny bone throughout its almost two-hour runtime. 

The film, shot by DOP Aditya Kumar, features one of Hindi cinema’s finest and memorable opening sequences of recent times. The preluding voice of a wise man narrating existential poetry envelops the first significant minutes of the film. Thakur Sa (Altaf Khan) is the man, the myth and the legend of this film. As he stumbles his way out of a shady bar and drinks away his misery—his dug dug (the sound of a motorcycle engine) or luna (moped) is his only companion during that dark, ominous night. The camera conveys his jitteriness and helplessness through out-of-focus bokeh shots and dangerously swaying movements alongside trucks and other vehicles.

The inevitable happens and a truck tramples over him, leaving his body torn into two cartoonishly-dissected halves. (Yes, at the waist). It would be unfair to call Thakur Sa the sole protagonis, because his luna is also a strong contender. After police investigations, the luna continually keeps returning to the spot where he passed away, right under an illustrated billboard featuring a local magician’s wide-open eyes, as if he’s witnessing this magic trick happening (or perhaps, he’s the one orchestrating it?) The film also foreshadows Thakur Sa’s shawarma-split-in-half fate through an illustration beneath the magician’s face, depicting him performing the “lady cut in half” table trick. As rumours surrounding the strange events begin to spread, so too does the conviction that Thakur’s spirit has somehow taken residence within the motorcycle.

The policemen investigating this incident, namely Pyare Lal (Gaurav Soni), Badri (Yogendra Singh) and Manfool (Durga Lal Saini) sit on a cot and drink during their night shift. One cop is inching toward retirement, frustrated by the village’s almost comically uneventful crime rate. Another is trapped under suffocating family pressure to produce a grandson after a series of abortions. The third drifts through life as a lonely idealist, clinging to aggressive optimism. It soon becomes clear that the sun-bleached emptiness of Dug Dug’s deserts is populated by people quietly wrestling with their own private fractures, each desperate for, you guessed it—fate. And if fate refuses, well, there’s always the option of “manufacturing” it which is the theme this film plays around with.

Thakur Sa’s so-called peace ritual comes with an unusual instruction from the priest: devotees must offer him the things he loved most in life. In a sly inversion of religious orthodoxy, alcohol—typically condemned as sacrilegious—becomes the very medium through which believers seek divine favour. As stories of fulfilled wishes begin to circulate, the shrine rapidly transforms from a site of faith into a thriving commercial ecosystem.

Soon, everything from toothpaste brands and banks to butcher shops borrow his name as a badge of prosperity, all wrapped in the same loud pink-and-blue aesthetic. What follows is an escalating frenzy: donation boxes overflowing with cash, educational institutions springing up overnight and politicians eagerly aligning themselves with the phenomenon for their own gain. With every new montage, the carnival of collective delusion swells larger, accommodating every shade of greed under the guise of devotion.

The film itself does not mock a particular religion or culture—rather, it questions how people cling to any form of order in a world that denies them everything else. So much so that people are willing to conjure a god out of a dead man or in this case, also his motorcycle. Anyone who benefits the public, or simply gives the impression of doing so through anecdotal accounts, ultimately becomes a god. And that is a dangerous premise—one that makes Dug Dug’s conflict so terrifying because it is deeply rooted in reality.

Funky jazz beats, whip pans, quick zooms and symmetrical framing give the film a certain Wes Anderson and Edgar Wright-like quality. There are perhaps traces of many other influences, such as Stanley Kubrick and Quentin Tarantino, though the film ultimately succeeds in building a unique world of its own.

The film’s music is easily one of its strongest aspects, with the Salvage Audio Collective delivering a soundtrack that feels both chaotic and oddly fitting for the world the film builds. Ankur Tiwari’s lyrics and vocals add to that delirious mood beautifully. One sequence in particular stands out—a ridiculously catchy, auto-tune-soaked track that turns devotion into something resembling a full-blown rave. It’s part bhajan, part nightclub anthem and completely in sync with the film’s satirical energy. 

Where the film ultimately falters is in its own indulgence. Many of the jokes land brilliantly at first, but the film keeps circling back to the same comic beats until the humour begins to wear thin. What initially feels energetic slowly turns repetitive, to the point where the constant barrage of montages starts testing one’s patience. The film is constructed heavily through montage sequences and the second half leans heavily into building the mythology around Thakur Sa’s motorcycle and the empire that grows around it.

What begins as a superstition gradually turns into an elaborate temple dedicated to the dead man and his machine. But as the film keeps inflating the legend and symbolic power of the motorcycle, it rarely moves beyond the same narrative rhythm or satirical point. The escalation becomes bigger, louder, and more elaborate—yet not necessarily more insightful.

To the film’s credit, it does eventually tie its threads together and reveal the forces driving this bizarre phenomenon. Still, the uneven pacing significantly affects its watchability. That is frustrating precisely because so much else works: the film is visually vibrant, tonally distinct, consistently catchy and confident in its strange sense of humour and world-building. Its biggest weakness is an inability to know when it has already made its point. In a country like India, where faith often exists somewhere between lived reality and carefully sustained fiction, overall, Dug Dug manages to capture that contradiction with striking accuracy.