My Birthday Song movie review: A clever idea that fails to take off

My Birthday Song
Director - Samir Soni
Cast - Sanjay Suri, Nora Fatehi
Rating - 2/5

What would you do if you have one of the worst imaginable nightmares and wake up to find that you are living it bit by bit? That is the basic premise of Samir Soni’s My Birthday Song and it is hard to find fault with it. As far as concepts go, this is a fairly intriguing one.

My Birthday Song is the story of an ad agency owner, Rajiv Kaul (Sanjay Suri), who has a scary nightmare and wakes up to see parts of the dream being repeated in different settings and places through the day. Afraid that it will end the way his dream did – in catastrophe, Rajiv even tries to interfere and change the final outcome. Will he succeed? Is it just a nightmare or did he actually have a glimpse of what his fortieth birthday held for him? Is he a victim of a practical joke it is he a victim of someone’s evil plans? Or, maybe, he is just imagining things?

The film keeps us engaged in the narrative, raising such questions with each turn of events and Sanjay Suri ensures he plays the protagonist with grace, confusion, fear and guilt.

The actor has portrayed complex characters with elan before and My Birthday Song rides completely on his shoulders. The dialogues are mostly in English or English mixed with Hindi and that is in keeping with the milieu to which the characters belong.

It is the heavy-footed treatment of the film that fails it. It is so overdramatic that even the solid theme on which it is based gets lost. There is a concerted effort that every trope associated with a thriller -- shaky frames, strange camera angles and sudden jump cuts – is introduced in the film, making it repetitive and boring.

My Birthday Song has Purab Kohli and Pitobash in guest appearances and both are wasted. The character of Pitobash is especially a forced addition for he is there only to spout dialogues on moral values and philosophy in a psychological thriller.

Debutante director Samir Soni starts off with an amazing idea which is failed by its execution.

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The author tweets @SwetaKaushal