Kapkapiii Review: Only Shreyas Talpade Stands Out In This Horror-Comedy

News18

23-05-2025

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Kapkapiii, starring Shreyas Talpade and Tusshar Kapoor, attempts to blend horror and comedy but falls short. Despite Talpade's efforts, the film lacks depth and effective humour.
Kapkapiii fails to balance horror and comedy effectively.
Gone are the days when Bollywood filmmakers relied on one particular genre to make a film work. After all, the makers must be at par with the audience's ever-evolving taste. Hence, they came up with an idea – to blend horror with comedy. And the result? The popularity of films such as Stree and Stree 2. But is this emerging genre considered a guaranteed success formula? Umm, not quite. To understand this better, watch Shreyas Talpade and Tusshar Kapoor's latest release, Kapkapiii.
Manu (played by Shreyas Talpade) lives in an apartment with five of his friends. Their bachelor's pad is like any other you generally imagine – messy, scattered clothes and fighting over daily chores. On the floor above live two girls (Siddhi Idnani and Sonia Rathee) who, over time, become good friends with them. One day, they decide to 'play a game' with an Ouija board and use it to summon spirits. What seems like fun at first soon turns into a chaotic bummer for them after a spirit named Anamika appears. What happens next, forms the story.
The story, director Sangeeth Sivan's posthumous release, is supposed to be simple. And it is. But the makers lose the balance between horror and comedy, and the film comes crashing down. It lacks depth, screenplay and editing. And not to mention, the dialogues lack nuance. Both filmmakers and actors have often noted how difficult it is to pull off comedy on the screen, for it is all about timing. But barring Shreyas and occasionally Tusshar, every moment, every act of comedy in the film seems forced. There are moments when the screen goes silent for a few seconds after a character says something funny, as if to give the audience some space to laugh before it cuts to the next scene. Sadly, no chuckles could be heard from either corner of an almost-empty theatre.
There are double-meaning dialogues, but aren't we way past the Grand Masti phase? Also, when Tusshar Kapoor tells Shreyas Talpade, 'Mard ko bhi dard hota hain… Komal badan hain mera, why so insensitive?", you can't help but wonder what the dialogue-writer must have thought when he penned this. Then there's another gem: 'Itne sad kyu ho, biryani mein ilaichi zyada ho gayi kya?"
Throughout the film, everyone, at some point, wakes up with a start, with or without reason. The film's vision wasn't bad, but the execution? Not so much.
There's no smoothness or finesse in the editing. They say the editing team propels a film before it is made public. However, almost every scene in Kapkapiii ends abruptly. It's like an unfinished glass which has been kept outside for selling without any finishing. Every other scene ends with a fade in or fade out, depending on the last usage. And mind you, the film follows no parallel storylines.
The only good thing about the film is Shreyas Talpade. The actor, known for his seamless comic timing, gives the film his all. He is the one making all the effort, which makes sitting through it bearable. With this film, Shreyas proves that he can shine even in a movie with a flat script. He shoulders it all along, and his fans are just happy to see him back on the screen following his health scare last year.
As for Tusshar Kapoor, he, too, is best known for his comic characters. The makers could have utilised his presence to its full potential, but there's only so much you can do when you enter the film nearly two hours in. There is Dibyendu Bhattacharya, The Kerala Story fame Siddhi Idnani and Broken But Beautiful star Sonia Rathee but their presence hardly ever makes any difference to the storyline.
At one point, the plot of Kapkapiii feels like an endless loop – there's someone always cooking some food for the rest of the boys in the kitchen, another asking everyone to stop with the Ouija experiment. Yet another is always smoking and using the toilet. The others have little or no meaning. Oh, and there's a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance by the ghost and a ghost hunter, completed with standard scary background sounds—but we're still wondering what purpose it serves in the film.
All in all, Kapkapiii, the supposed remake of the 2023 superhit Malayalam film Romancham, tries to spook and spoof—but ends up caught in the middle, doing justice to neither.
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