An official remake (and I won’t dignify it by using the much abused term ‘adaptation’) of the Malayalam film Romancham, Kapkapii is essentially a story of six boys that start observing peculiar activities in their house while messing with an ouija board that potentially unleashes an evil spirit. Right from the first frame, I knew that the drama here was in trouble. Remember the cozy conversations that brew between the character of Soubin Shahir and the nurse in the original? The same sequence while copy-pasted just feels stale and lacks the soul with respect to its staging. The staging is further degraded in its extended flashback sequence when all the characters are introduced turn by turn.

The beauty of Romancham lay in its detailing – the drama itself felt rooted from the bylanes of Bangalore where madness would ensue. The house itself felt like a place reserved for the bachelors given how tiny it was and the chemistry between the boys was the main highlight of the drama to begin with. In that regard, Kapkapii is a scene by scene anti-thesis of sorts that tries to add a few ingredients of its own in the narrative that don’t add any distinct flavours at all. Firstly, the setting is that of Faridabad (and not Bangalore) that just didn’t give the vibe of the city. Secondly, the house looked a little more polished and spacious, only for it to appear to look like a bachelor’s house (logistics remain a big issue for films in Bollywood that compromises on the soul of the film). And lastly, the chemistry between the boys felt just so staged that the energy didn’t seem to flow in an organic manner. But as an addition, you are also introduced to two female characters that fail to add a unique texture in the drama.

The basic beats of Kapkapii remain similar to Romancham, but what the film lacks is its unhinged source of eccentricity that essentially drove the narrative in the original. Because there are female characters too (and this isn’t a gender debate folks), the natural inclination of the writing remained to incorporate additional tracks in the narrative that only slowed the proceedings further. In a scene, you are witness to a character talking to a girl that he hasn’t ever met, on the phone while the joke remains on how the girl is one of the female characters who lives right above his roof. But by doing this, you directly compromised on the setting wherein the spacious house doesn’t give out the same vibes.

You remember the wedding sequence at the start in Romancham and how the boys are just grooving to the beats while exiting the location? The Bollywood-ized version of it incorporates an item number out of nowhere, just to cater to the lowest common denominator as far as the viewers are concerned. And notice how Romancham had an underlying commentary on the lack of jobs amongst the characters that actually was a trigger point for the rest of the drama to unfold? That commentary is severely diluted here, focusing more on the comedy of jest in attempting a game of ‘ouija’ as opposed to actually making the unemployment a driving force in the narrative. The gags by the way, are unfunny and forced as well while the humour just doesn’t land. Hell, even the sequence involving Dibyendu Chattacharya’s don character was so unfunny and odd in terms of its staging, that it could never match the madness of Chemban Vinod Jose from the original.

One main feature of Romancham remained the ambiguity of the spirit that was balanced out by various factors in the narrative (like the present of rats for an instance). But because the focus here was to spoon-feed the viewers, the makers decided to lay everything on the table by randomly stuffing the narrative with multiple jump-cuts in the middle of a scene, only to leave the viewers dazed and confused at what was being served to them. This also includes a headache prone extended sequence featuring a new character Kabir (Tusshar Kapoor) that didn’t really dwell upon his trauma while being extremely repetitive in its presentation. All of this, while I patiently awaited the film to end, quietly sitting through one sequence after another until the finale that tested my patience to no bounds. It weirdly was neither a horror that worked on its atmospherics, and nor was it a comedy wherein my facial muscles refused to flinch even once. The screenplay here invented a new genre called a headache-comedy that had its effects on me, long after the film had ended!