"Aapke best moments na hamesha off-cam hi hotey hain,” an assistant director on a reality show (snarkily named Truth Ya Naach) tells the protagonist of LSD 2’s first short. It happens shortly after the said character, Noor (Paritosh Tiwari), who has been gaining eyeballs and votes mostly because of her status as a transwoman, has flung a glass of water at her mother amid a heated argument. The two go on to recreate it on the show’s Bigg Boss-like set, or, shall we say — recreate it on-cam? 

Hardly anybody else satirises the trappings of the world at any given point as sharply as Dibakar Banerjee. In LSD 2, he returns to a scalding point that’s singularly his — sparing no moving part of the fiendish trinity that are reality TV, social media and alternate reality. This film doesn’t need the futuristic template that one commonly associates with more sophisticated (and hence distant) products like Black Mirror or Severance — only because everything it depicts is freely available in the present.

The three stories

This raucous follow-up to the breakout 2010 original is narrated through cams, mobile and PC screens, VR headsets and the looming arrival of AI. The unstinting ambition of the inhabitants of this world forms the life force of the three chain reactions, the three shorts that together make up LSD 2. The reality TV show Noor is on, is entirely dependent on algorithms and harnessing every last dreg of screen voyeurism for brand deals and sponsorships. Kullu, also a transwoman, navigates love and livelihood in addition to headlining her boyfriend’s small-time social media reality show. Game Paapi, a pimpled, hormonal 18-year-old gaming influencer given to cussing and bullying younger children at school, manifests a free fall into alternate reality.

A scary future seeping into the present

Banerjee has taken on quite a few subjects and blitzed them into a pungent-tasting smoothie that you cannot really put down. Working with Eeb Allay Ooo! (2019) writers Prateek Vats and Shubham, he launches a scathing attack on our insatiable appetite to peep through the keyhole. Bullying and cyberbullying, the farce of reality television, content creation and the churn that governs its steady evolution, the ominous arrival of the metaverse, the evolution of news channels that we’ve been all privy to, and, of course the vast gulf between the off-cam and on-cam world — LSD 2 does not spare a moment to throw shade at the cesspool of the screen.

What gives the film its serrated edge is that though the shocking material gets the ‘the future looks like this’ treatment in terms of its grim, sardonic tone and ubiquity of algorithms, deepfake and AI, all of which we still treat as concepts yet to arrive — the plot is bang in middle of our collective lived experience. Banerjee gives it all a whirl and by way of the act of you watching this film, snips the connection of subjectivity between the screen and its audience. The formal chaos and the self-reflexivity of the plot and its treatment might suggest it is more suited to the self-guided OTT experience, but perhaps that’s not the point of LSD 2.

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