‘Orijinal’ movie review: A time travel film in which the human story is more intriguing than the time travel

When the makers of Orijinal named the film so, with the play of alphabets signifying protagonist Rijin’s name, they were probably acutely aware of the lack of originality of the time travel concept on which the film is built. This awareness is also acknowledged in hat tips to classic films of the genre such as Back to the Future in the dialogues as well as through a character wearing a yellow jacket inspired from the popular German series Dark.

Director Ramees attempts to make up for this lack of novelty by using the whole film to raise pertinent questions on originality, especially in cinema. The time travel trope becomes an excuse for the portrayal of a man introspecting his life choices and then using the accidental gift of time travel to make amends, not always in the right way. It mostly plays around the inherent wish in many humans to correct their past. 

Rijin Yousuf (Sreenath Bhasi), an aspiring filmmaker who attempts to make a name in the industry in 2012 through the easy way of copying little known foreign films, has the shock of his life when he meets his own version, 12 years from the future. The duo, or rather the two Rijins, embark on a journey to play with time to achieve all that he had dreamt of since childhood.

More than the time travel theme, one of the things that work for the film is perhaps the conversations between the two Rijins, which begin on a humorous note using all the changes in society and the film industry over the 12 years. However, soon it attains a certain depth with both characters in the different timelines contemplating about the cost of their actions and experiencing in real-time the after-effects of minute changes. On a broader note, it also makes one think of how the passing of years and the accumulation of experiences can bring about dramatic change in someone’s worldview, sometimes for the worse.

Though the film remains intriguing and engaging until the third act, things become a little convoluted towards the end, when it continues to revolve around the happenings in a particular character’s life due to Rijin’s actions. It regains some of what it lost through a tail-end sequence involving his childhood version, although the film switches into preachy mode by that time. The evident use of AI in some of the shots also makes a mockery of the title. The filmmaker might attribute this to his wish to realise his vision without being limited by the budget. Sreenath Bhasi easily overcomes the challenge of portraying both the characters from different timelines for a considerable length of the movie.

Orijinal is a time travel film where the human story is more intriguing than the time travel.