A group of jobless boys begin dabbling with an Ouija board just for kicks. At first, it’s all fun and games — until strange eerie events start to unfold. What begins as harmless mischief soon spirals into chaos, turning their lives literally upside down. By the way, Kapkapiii is a Hindi remake of the 2023 Malayalam horror-comedy Romancham, a story that talks about blind faith, and a rather unknown disease.
Manu (Shreyas Talpade) and his friends Achyut (Dinker Sharma), Nanku (Jay Thakkar), Nirup (Varun Pande) and others are a bunch of nobodies sharing a room and doing all the aimless things out-of-work boys usually do. Things get mildly exciting when two young girls — Kavya (Siddhi Idnani) and Madhu (Sonia Rathee) — move in next door. However, when romance seems like a possibility, the otherwise story takes a sharp, spooky turn when Manu brings home an Ouija board.
The film ends up as neither a comedy nor a horror film, especially with the screenplay, rooted in a solid concept, that feels cluttered with far too many characters and plenty of chaos. The net result is that while the humour works, the horror often fizzles. And what begins as just harmless fun quickly treads into eerie territory coupled with spooky twists and ghastly chaos.
Sivan had a flair for slapstick comedy but here, in this latest venture of his, buried under the pressure to get the genre of horror-comedy right, he just ends up dishing out a too pretentious and predictable and often unpalatable stuff. Unlike the Malayalam original, the remake fails to do justice to the rootedness of the story. After grotesque ghost stories like Stree, Munjyya, The Bhootnii, the makers are too busy in trying to gratify the appetite of the audience to see more films of this genre but fail grotesquely.
As far as the performances are concerned, all that I can say is that Shreyas Talpade is one remarkable talent who never got the due he deserved. He has completed almost 25 years in cinema this year. His Iqbal is one of the finest pieces of work by a debutant. Unfortunately, he was made a sidekick in most of the corny comedies. Tusshar Kapoor looks and acts the best when mute. Barring Khakee and Shor in The City, he hasn’t had one solid performance in his repertoire.
– Review by Jyothi Venkatesh
Cast of Kapkapiii:
Shreyas Talpade as Manu
Tusshar Kapoor
Siddhi Idnani as Kavya
Jay Thakkar as Nanku
Sonia Rathee as Madhu
Abhishek Kumar
Varun Pandey as Nirup
Dherendra Tiwari
Manmeet Kaur
Credits of Kapkapiii:
Directed by Sangeeth Sivan
Screenplay by Kumar Priyadarshi, Saurabh Anand
Based on Romancham by Jithu Madhavan
Produced by Jayesh Patel
Production company – Bravo Entertainment
Cinematography – Deep Sawant
Edited by Bunty Nagi
Music by Ajay Jayanti
Platform of Release- Theatres
Running time 138 minutes
