The biggest and single-most scariest part of Click is watching Sada go glam as a model in the shortest of skirts and plunging necklines, speaking in Sridevi-accented Hindi.
Cheap shot? You can say that for the film as well. The film's not just shamelessly ripped-off from Shutter , it's a cheesy, exploitative horror film that doesn't waste any time trying to set it up. The first scare comes seven minutes into the film. Okay, Sada appears earlier.
Sangeeth Sivan has absolutely no pretensions of making an RGV-esque spook tale and the film does not even pretend to be intelligent. So there's a generous dose of ‘dream cheats' (Implausible stories that end with a convenient ‘it was all a dream' construct) that aid the filmmaker churn out the scares with creepy cinematography and eerie sound design.
Nightmares don't need logic, anything could happen to the protagonists one moment and they would be fine when they wake up. So when things actually happen, Sangeeth becomes The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
A section of the audience burst out laughing when yet another abrupt cut ends with the protagonist waking up. This time, he's in the hospital, everything what we had seen had actually happened but the ploy is lost on the audience simply because the director had used the dream cheat one too many times before in the story.
The film would still work for those who haven't seen the original and to give the copycat his due, there are enough tense jump scenes to make scaredy-cats in the hall hide under their seats.
While Shreyas underplays the role, Sada goes a little over the top but that's where the similarities end. As in all horror films, they all seem to be curiously heading towards the ghost when crazy things happen instead of getting the hell out of there.
The girl formerly of the Aishwarya Rai look-alike fame, Sneha Ullal is aptly cast as the ghost but she can do better than choosing films with names such as Lucky or Click to actually get lucky or clicking.
The rest of the cast, especially, the friends of the protagonist are there to get killed because that's how it works in horror films. Someone has to die every few minutes. What's interesting here, however, is the filmmaker bumps them off quickly and spends most of the time making the ghost chase the lead pair.
So while Click packs in more scares than the average Ram Gopal Varma film, it lacks the subtlety and class of RGV's older horror films.
Go for it if you are still in your late teens and it may just Click for you. The rest of you, catch Shutter on DVD. Or RGV Ki Aag for better results.
Click
Genre: Horror
Director: Sangeeth Sivan
Cast: Shreyas Talpade, Sada, Sneha Ullal
Storyline: A young photographer and his girlfriend are haunted by the spirit of a mysterious dead girl who frequents their photographs, dreams and lives after an accident.
Bottomline: A photo-copy of most of the happenings from Shutter with liberally borrowed imagery from Japanese-inspired Hollywood horror films.
