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‘Kapkapiii’ Movie Review: Shreyas Talpade's Remake of 'Romancham' Forgets It’s a Horror-Comedy
'Kapkapiii' is distracted, disconnected and has 142 minutes of vibes.
Director: Sangeeth Sivan
Writers: Kumar Priyadarshi, Saurabh Anand
Cast: Shreyas Talpade, Jay Thakkar, Dinker Sharma, Dherendra Kumar Tiwari, Tusshar Kapoor, Abhishek Kumar, Varun Pandey, Siddhi Idnani, Sahil Verma, Sonia Rathee
Language: Hindi
It’s never a good sign when you watch a remake and immediately have to look up the story of the original to understand exactly what you watched. Being in the dark for 142 minutes can go two ways: either it happened or you slept early and had a fever dream. Kapkapiii is somehow a bit of both; the viewer is never sure where their own reality ends and fiction begins. It is disorienting, patched-up, sporadic and incomplete, and not in a good-psychedelic way.
Based on the Malayalam horror-comedy Romancham (2023), it tells (but also untells) the tale of six male flatmates sharing a decrepit apartment in which strange things happen after they mess around with a makeshift Ouija board. There are also two young women who live above, a swaggy Muslim don, Kya-Kool-Hai-Hum-meets-Delhi-Belly innuendos that don’t land, a graveyard for rats (!), a weird houseguest, and jumpscares that exist for the heck of it. To be fair, they’re all as confused as we are.
Kapkapiii starts off as a semi-raunchy buddy comedy, embarking on multiple genre diversions — sometimes within the same scene — and finishes on vibes alone. Coherence is a luxury; shots and transitions and exposition seem to be missing, but even if they’re not missing, you’d be none the wiser. For instance, one of the guys (label: the pensive ‘South Indian’ one) spends his nights whispering sweet nothings to a phone sweetheart. He doesn’t know how this girl looks, they’ve never met, but this is never established because the gag is that she lives upstairs and he has no clue. In fact, he is annoyed by her advances and come-hither gestures. The gag is also that this girl is mysterious and could be a ghost. The jury is out on that one. The banter between the guys rarely registers, mostly because the film unfolds as an assortment of isolated moments. There are times when 3 to 4 of the gang disappear for long stretches of the film, and you can almost sense the actors not having dates or shooting schedules going awry.
At some point, it seems to be heading into semi-amusing territory when the friends summon a spirit called Anamika through the board and turn her powers into a thriving side-business; customers pay to ask questions and the queues are long. I chuckled at the Whatsapp-level joke of Dibyendu Bhattacharya’s don character ‘testing’ the board by asking the name of his father, only to be told his uncle’s name instead; the sequence of him going through stages of denial hints at a pulse. But then the group gets scared, throws away the board, the fun stops and the film goes back to combing through ideas in search of an identity. Every train of thought is derailed halfway through, like a stream-of-consciousness montage of something that once resembled a witty horr-com (or is ‘horredy’ better?).
The first half and second half are as disconnected as mainstream Bollywood from the masses: two different entities that are separated by much more than an interval. Tusshar Kapoor appears as a creepy Darna-Mana-Hai-coded guest in the final hour, but just like Anamika, his arc is left to blow in the wind and see which direction it flies in. It’s a good time to mention that the whole film unfolds as a story being recalled by Manu, now a patient in a hospital, to his bored nurse. So perhaps one can blame the disjointedness on his blurry memory. But this is of course far from intentional. It’s like rationalising a deafening Marvel movie climax by claiming that those comic-book pages had food stains on them. In the end, this becomes the manifestation of Michael Scott’s confession in The Office: “Sometimes I’ll start a sentence and I don’t know where it’s going, I just hope to find it along the way”. Kapkapiii starts many sentences, and I’m still waiting to know where they’re going. I have all the time in the world.