February 19, 2010
Cast: Shreyas Talpade, Sneha Ullal, Sada
Director: Sangeeth Sivan
Click, directed by Sangeeth Sivan, is a horror movie. And just so you know, I don’t mean that as a genre description. This embarrassingly amateurish film stars Shreyas Talpade as a (rather unconvincing) hotshot photographer who’s returning home from an evening of drunken revelry, with his equally inebriated girlfriend at the wheel of their car. When they accidentally knock down a girl on a desolate road, the couple flees the spot. Soon after, he is haunted by an otherworldly presence. His photographs suddenly appear to reveal a supernatural element, and his friends begin to kill themselves. His girlfriend decides to investigate these strange occurrences and chances upon a murky secret involving a former lover.
Generously inspired from the similarly harebrained-but-at-least-marginally engaging American B-movie Shutter, which was itself a remake of a Thai original, Sivan’s desi version borrows visual references from so many Japanese and Korean films it’s hard to keep count.
To be honest, there’s not one scary moment in this film; in fact it’s unintentionally hilarious, particularly that portion in which Shreyas is chased down a ladder with a white-faced ghost in hot pursuit. Sneha Ullal (who you may remember as the Aishwarya Rai-lookalike in that Salman Khan-starrer Lucky) plays the ghost in question who just won’t quit. There’s also a ludicrous side-track involving a mother who has gone to unbelievable lengths to convince herself that her daughter’s not dead.
Painfully dreary and packed with tacky special effects, Click offers very little in terms of entertainment. The usually dependable Shreyas Talpade fails to pull off a convincing performance, and looks woefully miscast as a slick lensman.
For a few good laughs, if nothing else, I recommend you revisit one of those old Ramsay films instead of this plodding bore.
I’m going with one out of five for director Sangeeth Sivan’s Click. What’s scary is that films like these get made!
(This review first aired on CNN-IBN)