PremiumBlink - Dheekshith Shetty on playing a character with Oedipus complex
After reading director Srinidhi Bengaluru’s script of Blink, Dheekshith says he was disturbed for a couple of days and could not sleep
Last Updated: 07.38 PM, Apr 10, 2024
Blink, the Kannada sci-fi film starring Dheekshith Shetty, has ended its theatrical run and is, according to sources headed to OTT later this month. After a slow start, the Srinidhi Bengaluru directed film picked up slowly and had a decent 25-day theatrical run, based solely on the power of word-of-mouth publicity. Dheekshith, who had been guarded about his role in the film has now begun discussing the complexities of the same.
In a recent interview with a UK-based Indian film portal Film, Dheekshith spoke at length about getting into the skin of his character Apurva. In the film, Apurva is a young collegian and theatre lover, whose father walked out on the family years ago and is presumed dead. When a mysterious elderly gentleman tells Apurva that his father may be alive and thriving, he embarks on a journey that throws up uncomfortable truths. Apurva, as it turns out, is in a loop of sorts, wherein he travels back as a middle-aged man, calls himself Arivu and proceeds to have a relationship with Devaki Aras (Chaithra J Achar), who is Apurva’s birth mother.
This twist that Apurva is Arivu and has a sexual relationship with his mother was a shocker for audiences and Dheekshith too says that it was not easy for him to play the same onscreen, even though, Arivu was played by Vajradheer Jain. In fact, Dheekshith says that he could not sleep well for a couple of days after reading the script and trying to understand the Oedipus complex, because that was the soul of the film. Time travel, he says, was only an add on.
“I needed to understand why he would love his own mother. As an Indian, the family emotions that we carry make it difficult to digest something like the Oedipus complex. He is in love with his mother and sleeps with her too; I found that difficult to come to terms with. It took me a couple of days, during which I sought answers to the queries I had about Apurva’s motivation, and only then was I convinced that I could play the character,” Dheekshith said.