'Dry Day' review: Anti-drink satire with zero fizz

Apt titles are hard to come by. Saurabh Shukla's 'Dry Day' unwittingly manages this feat. This wannabe political satire is dry as a bone and just as tasteless. Sitting through two hours of this supposedly anti-alcoholism movie was torture. It made me want to down several shots of vodka.

Sadly, it has a great premise, and decent actors in Jitendra Kumar (of TVF Pitchers' fame), Shriya Pilgaonkar and Annu Kapoor. It begins interestingly enough in Jagodar, a fictitious town somewhere in north India, seething with unemployment, petty politics and roaming wastrels getting sloshed through the day. If the writers and the creatives had put their minds to it, this could well have been a gritty version of 'Panchayat' (Amazon Prime) which was, incidentally, also headlined by Kumar. Instead, it wants to jump like a drunken rabbit from a Bhansali-inspired Holi song to hunger strikes, street fights, baby shower songs, self-immolations, and political chicanery. Exhausting and repetitive, the movie that wants to be a dramedy only ends up giving the hapless viewer the feel of a halfway house.

The lone redeeming factor that one can extract from this mess is the movie's intention — it wants to bring to the fore the many ills of alcoholism across small towns in India and how this can lead to a social downward spiral. That said, a blanket ban on alcohol is not a silver bullet for all societal ills, as the movie seems to suggest.