Directed by Ravi Shankar Sharma, this disastrously literal transcreation of Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others, the only Hindi adaptation since Govind Menon’s Khwahish to borrow almost every frame and word from the original—is redeemed from inevitable doom by the strong and persuasive central presence by Dimple Kapadia.
She’s one of the few performers in Bollywood who has the ability to look dignified and devastatingly in-character even in the worst of times. And this one is admittedly the bottom of the barrel, for no other major reason except for that fact that it regurgitates the original material without a thought for indigenous suitability.
Though they speak in Hindi, the characters seem to be thinking in the English language. Their manner and their attitude suggest a huge chasm between their speech and thought processes. Also, the director seems to have placed the plot in frozen time. Dimple and her two children live in a mansion (crumbling in The Others, rather suspiciously spick-and-span in this re-make).
The elder child, a precocious girl (played with aggressive precocity by Hansika Motwani), keeps ‘seeing’ spirits in the house. Wish we could see something more exciting than Dimple’s glossy hair, which frames her astonishingly lucid face like a luminescent photo-frame.
At least someone gets into the spirit of things in this lustreless stroll into spookiness. Dimple seems to have got into the ghoulish groove without being the least influenced by Nicole Kidman’s unforgettably smothered performance in the original. The rest of the cast seems to have studied the original (and extremely disturbing) film in minute detail. Moushumi Chatterjee, as the nanny, narrows her eyes into sniggering slits and curls up her lips to share secret jokes with herself. Maybe she knows something we don’t and should’ve known before venturing in this film.
The scenes that bring Kapadia and Chatterjee together are watchable strictly in the optical sense. Cinematographer Ishwar Bidri captures the two beautiful women with affection. But the film is let down by its lighting patterns. We’re repeatedly told that Dimple’s children are photophobic. But the frames are constantly flooded with artificial light. This is a compromise necessitated by the quality of film projection in the smaller cities. It’s also an indication of why The Others should’ve never been made into Hindi.
The theme is too peculiar to the culture it describes to render a tenable transcreation. The characters appear to shuffle in a vacuum, looking more zapped than the spooky ambience demands.
Blessedly, there’re no songs to break the plot… though on second thoughts, there should have been some diversion from the original material to give this remake a native touch.
Dimple carries the film beyond where it would have been otherwise. But, pray tell, what’s Mr. Bachchan doing in the film?! Not only is he utterly mismatched with Dimple, he looks thoroughly ill-at-ease playing father to pre-teen kids. The romantic interlude between the couple, done in a flashback, looks added on to give the frightening film a more filled-out look.
Towards the end, Dharmendra, looking extremely frail, shows up to share screen space with Amitabh Bachchan. Their dialogues sound like a badly written play on the wages of nostalgia.
Though in isolation no one gives a bad performance, none of the cast connects with one another, not even the little girl and boy who play the stunned siblings. By the time the ghouls in human form show up to claim the ‘living’ characters, the plot has already reached a grave stage. There’s no chance of the narrative about dread rising from the dead.
Hum Kaun Hain, which clocked 21 years this month, ends up looking like a fish out of water. The chilling ambience, stressed by the loud background score, stresses out the narrative rather than opening up the original material. If there’s a prize for the most misplaced horror film ever, this one should get it hands down.
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