Bhoomi (Priyanka Kumar) and Akash (Vijay Krishna) invite their close-knit friends to celebrate their fifth year of being in a relationship. A fun night, propelled by the couple’s musical performance, turns sour when the two break into an argument. Blame game follows, with both of them calling each other selfish.

The impetus for the fight is as small as Akash, a violinist, overshadowing Bhoomi, a flautist, during their performance. Why are they so fragile in understanding each other despite being together for five years? Well, if time were a measure of a relationship’s health, we wouldn’t have witnessed late-life divorces.

Mansore’s Doora Theera Yaana is a serious relationship drama that speaks about the importance of communication in relationships. The director tries to understand the psyche of people who hold on to a relationship without expressing their expectations from it, primarily out the fear of losing each other.

Akash and Bhoomi decide to go on a one-week vacation to talk their hearts out and decide on their next big step of marriage. From the start, Mansore lays bare the complexities in relationships. What you wear and where you go is often decided by your partner and your response is just a silent agreement.

A still from ‘Doora Theera Yaana’.
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Amid the tensions, every moment of understanding feels like a small victory for Bhoomi and Akash. And after every heated exchange, they show up the next day and work out a plan, the best way to make the relationship work. Doora Theera Yaana is filled with such sincere and relatable moments.

The couple has it in them to be in great sync during their musical performances. But, marriage isn’t a stage show. You either grind it out daily or break up to live on your own terms. Mansore’s film is a weighty drama that focuses more on the concept of love than on the process of falling in love.

My favourite scene is the one where Akash talks about how he is trying hard to overcome his insensitive nature. During the same conversation, Bhoomi fears that Akash resembles her dad in personality, with both men not understanding what she wants. These are genuine concerns seen in people in love, so often forgotten by writer-directors dealing with the genre. 

Despite being a road film, Doora Theera Yaana doesn’t use nature as a tool to deliver a picturesque experience. In the metaphor-heavy film, the sea is compared with a relationship, as Akash’s friend, a fisherman, talks about how one can’t measure the depth of the ocean without getting to the bottom of it. The melancholic cinematography and the soothing music maintain the soul-searching mood of the central characters, ensuring that the audience aren’t distracted by the beauty of the backdrop.

ALSO READ:‘Hebbuli Cut’ movie review: A sharp narrative on caste bias with an engaging screenplay

In the final act, we are told how Akash and Bhoomi are chalk and cheese in their worldviews. Bhoomi is career-oriented while Akash, perhaps, wants to see where he goes with his musical talent, before thinking of settling down with a full-time job. The manner in which the couple understands that they want separate things from each other is quite unconvincing. During the trip, Akash and Bhoomi meet strangers, who come across as therapists offering a different perspective on life and relationships. Mansore spends very little time on this plot point, reducing the intended impact of the idea.

The over-reliance on poetic language dents the organic flow of Doora Theera Yaana. I wish the film relied on circumstances to reveal the true selves of the characters. I wish the film had a lot more intensity during its closing portions. From the trivial, the arguments had to get more weighty. When a line in one of the songs says, ‘There is heaviness stirring inside despite being relieved’, you had to feel the pain of separation. That said, Doora Theera Yaana is a one-of-its-kind attempt in Kannada cinema. A full-fledged drama in the era of event films is a bold step.

Doora Theera Yaana is currently running in theatres

Published – July 11, 2025 07:05 pm IST

The titular character of the Apple TV+ series “Murderbot” doesn’t call itself Murderbot because it identifies as a killer; it just thinks the name is cool.

Murderbot, a.k.a. “SecUnit,” is programmed to protect people. But the task becomes less straightforward when Murderbot hacks the governor module in its system, granting itself free will. But the freedom only goes so far — the robot must hide its true nature, lest it get melted down like so much scrap metal.

The android, played by Alexander Skarsgård, is often fed up with humans and their illogical, self-defeating choices. It would rather binge-watch thousands of hours of trashy TV shows than deal with the dithering crew of space hippies to which it’s been assigned. On Friday, in the show’s season finale, the security robot made a choice with major implications for the relationships it formed with the Preservation Alliance crew — something the series could explore in the future (Apple TV+ announced Thursday it was renewing the show for a second season).

Though “Murderbot” is a unique workplace satire set on a far-off world, it’s one of several recent TV series dealing with the awkward and sometimes dangerous ways that humans might coexist with robots and artificial intelligence (or both in the same humanoid package).

Other TV shows, including Netflix’s “Love, Death & Robots” and last year’s “Sunny” on Apple TV+, grapple with versions of the same thorny technological questions we’re increasingly asking ourselves in real life: Will an AI agent take my job? How am I supposed to greet that disconcerting Amazon delivery robot when it brings a package to my front door? Should I trust my life to a self-driving Waymo car?

But the robots in today’s television shows are largely portrayed as facing the same identity issues as the ones from shows of other eras including “Lost in Space,” “Battlestar Galactica” (both versions) and even “The Jetsons”: How are intelligent robots supposed to coexist with humans?

They’ll be programmed to be obedient and not to hurt us (a la Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics) until, for dramatic purposes, something goes wrong. The modern era of TV robots are more complex, with the foundational notion that they will be cloud-connected, accessing the same internet bandwidth as humans, and AI-driven.

In HBO’s “Westworld,” Evan Rachel Wood played Dolores Abernathy, a sentient android. (HBO)

The robot in Apple TV+’s “Sunny” was designed to be a friendly helper to Rashida Jones’ Suzie. (Apple)

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Often, on shows such as AMC’s “Humans” and HBO’s “Westworld,” these AI bots become self-actualized, rising up against human oppressors to seek free lives when they realize they could be so much more than servants and sex surrogates. A major trope of modern TV robots is that they will eventually get smart enough to realize they don’t really need humans or come to believe that in fact, humans have been the villains all along.

Meanwhile, in the tech world, companies including Tesla and Boston Dynamics are just a few working on robots that can perform physical tasks like humans. Amazon is one of the companies that will benefit from this and will soon have more robots than people working in its warehouses.

Even more than robotics, AI technologies are developing more quickly than governments, users and even some of the companies developing them can keep up with. But we’re also starting to question whether AI technologies such as ChatGPT might make us passive, dumber thinkers (though, the same has been said about television for decades). AI could introduce new problems in more ways than we can even yet imagine. How will your life change when AI determines your employment opportunities, influences the entertainment you consume and even chooses a life partner for you?

So, we’re struggling to understand. AI, for all its potential, feels too large and too disparate a concept for many to get their head around. AI is ChatGPT, but it’s also Alexa and Siri, and it’s also what companies such as Microsoft, Google, Apple and Meta believe will power our future interactions with our devices, environments and other people. There was the internet, there was social media, now there’s AI. But many people are ambivalent, having seen the kind of consequences that always-present online life and toxic social media have brought alongside their benefits.

Past television series including “Next,” “Person of Interest,” “Altered Carbon” and “Almost Human” addressed potential abuses of AI and how humans might deal with fast-moving technology, but it’s possible they all got there too early to resonate in the moment as much as, say, “Mountainhead,” HBO’s recent dark satire about tech billionaires playing a high-stakes game of chicken while the world burns because of hastily deployed AI software. The quickly assembled film directed by “Succession’s” Jesse Armstrong felt plugged into the moment we’re having, a blend of excitement and dread about sudden widespread change.

Most TV shows, however, can’t always arrive at the perfect moment to tap into the tech anxieties of the moment. Instead, they often use robots or AI allegorically, assigning them victim or villain roles in order to comment on the state of humanity. “Westworld” ham-handedly drew direct parallels to slavery in its robot narratives while “Humans” more subtly dramatized the legal implications and societal upheaval that could result from robots seeking the same rights as humans.

But perhaps no show has extrapolated the near future of robots and AI tech from as many angles as Netflix’s “Black Mirror,” which in previous seasons featured a dead lover reconstituted into an artificial body, the ultimate AI dating app experience and a meta television show built by algorithms that stole storylines out of a subscriber’s real life.

Season 7, released in April, continued the show’s prickly use of digital avatars and machine learning as plot devices for stories about moviemaking, video games and even attending a funeral. In that episode, “Eulogy,” Phillip (Paul Giamatti) is forced to confront his bad life decisions and awful behavior by an AI-powered avatar meant to collect memories of an old lover. In another memorable Season 7 episode, “Bête Noire,” a skilled programmer (Rosy McEwen) alters reality itself to gaslight someone with the help of advanced quantum computing.

TV shows are helping us understand how some of these technologies might play out even as those technologies are quickly being integrated into our lives. But the overall messaging is murky when it comes to whether AI and bots will help us live better lives or if they’ll lead to the end of life itself.

According to TV, robots like the cute helper bot from “Sunny” or abused synthetic workers like poor Mia (Gemma Chan) from “Humans” deserve our respect. We should treat them better.

The robots and AI technologies from “Black Mirror?” Don’t trust any of them!

And SecUnit from “Murderbot?” Leave that robot alone to watch their favorite show, “The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon,” in peace. It’s the human, and humane, thing to do.

NEW YORK – It’s too simplistic to refer to “Sorry, Baby” (A24) as a #MeToo movie. Yet the film is topical as well as important and compelling.

There was a time when its main plot point would only have been shared woman-to-woman. That was before daytime TV programs and nighttime dramas brought in light to dissipate shame.

Even today, writer-director Eva Victor’s picture, in which she also stars, is anything but easy viewing. Yet, while the tale it tells is sometimes painful, it’s intimate and droll as well.

This is one woman’s frank account of a sexual assault and of her recovery. It involves harsh satirical portrayals of authority figures, including the police, who fail to help her seek justice. Instead, she has to figure out her own path forward, one awkward step at a time.

Victor plays Agnes, a promising graduate student at a small, rural New England university. The story is laid out in five chapters, each representing a year. But these are not dealt with chronologically. Some shuttling back and forth is needed in order to explain fully her relationships to other characters.

Agnes has a best friend and onetime housemate, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), with whom she shares all her deepest thoughts, while her love of literature and aspirations to become a writer are encouraged by her faculty thesis adviser, Professor Decker (Louis Cancelmi). Decker, it turns out, however, is less a nurturing mentor than a predator.

The attack itself is not seen. Victor shows long shots of Decker’s house, where the incident takes place, over a series of hours, ending with Agnes stumbling out in shock.

She tells Lydie about it in detail while in a tub, going over every confusing moment. Agnes already knows, before the police tell her, that it’s too late for a rape kit. But she’s further crushed to find that the university will do nothing to hold Decker to account, since he resigned the day after committing his crime.

Agnes is not pregnant, and there is no mention of abortion as a possible outcome.

“I can feel in my body that it was really bad,” Agnes says. “But there’s a reason, even if I can’t see it.”

The rest of the movie shows how Agnes, instead of giving way to anger and embitterment, builds her coping skills in the midst of routine activities. These include jury duty, a potential trigger for reviving the trauma.

In another brief scene, Decker is revealed to have preyed on one of Agnes’ classmates as well.

Most impressively, Agnes joins the faculty, moves into Decker’s former office and becomes an instinctively sensitive teacher of difficult fictional texts. Collapsing in anguish is not something she ever considers an option. She moves on courageously, although this is not done by forgetting, but rather by attempting to accumulate wisdom.

The film contains three scenes of implied sexual activity, mature material, including a sexual assault theme, an incidental homosexual relationship and an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, occasional banter and intermittent rough language. The OSV News classification is L — limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. The Motion Picture Association rating is R — restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

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