Kapkapiii

Sitting in 2025, a unique problem plagues Hindi cinema: the effort of watching them has trumped the labour of writing about them. While this might imply that the general quality has elevated, thereby making it difficult to unpack films, the opposite is true. The base level of movies has undergone a rapid deterioration of tragic proportions, and although most films in the last four years will reaffirm this proposition, Sangeeth Sivan’s Kapkapiii shines as a leading contender, at least this month. I don’t mean this as a jibe, but referring to Kapkapiii as a film is an overreach. Sure, in a strict sense of moving images, it qualifies, but the frivolity with which it unfolds, the indifference it offers and its absolute resistance to meaning suggest otherwise. Think of it like this: you go to watch a film and all you see is one build-up after another; you take it all in, hoping for a resolution, only for the screen to go blank at the moment of truth. It should have been a frustrating exercise, but even what we see in Kapkapiii makes so little sense that, in retrospect, no exposition could have salvaged it.

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.