Can Bollywood please stop treating every successful South Indian film like a recipe that it must load up with masala for a hapless audience? Director Apoorv Singh Karki’s Prem Keetanu is the latest example of what goes wrong when a remake copies the story but fails to understand why the original worked in the first place.
The original film, Premalu (2024), succeeded precisely because it did not try too hard. It didn’t exaggerate college life, romanticise characters’ struggles, and its treatment of love and rejection was not over the top. It was awkward, relatable, and honest. Prem Keetanu takes the same ingredients, makes everything bigger and louder, and in the process destroys the very charm of Premalu.
Director Girish AD’s original works because it understands that the protagonist Sachin is not a larger-than-life romantic hero. He is just a college boy who wants someone to love him. Naslen plays him with exactly that awkwardness, while Sangeeth Prathap’s Amal Davis is the kind of friend who will stand by him no matter what. Sachin falls for Reenu (Mamitha Baiju), gets rejected, follows her to another city, and finds himself competing with Aadhi (Shyam Mohan), a successful, confident man who keeps finding ways to put him down. Even Aadhi is not turned into some cartoonish villain.
Then comes Prem Keetanu, with Veer Parahiya’s Vishal. They dress him up in an ironed, baggy T-shirt, but far from coming across as a college kid, Pahariya’s character doesn’t even talk like a human being. Everything is caricatured.
Vishal and Suhani (Ashiya) look like they’re in love from the very beginning, which destroys the central idea of the original. In Premalu, the uncertainty of whether the leads will actually end up together is what makes their relationship interesting. Here, that uncertainty disappears almost immediately, making the entire thing predictable.
That is the biggest problem with this remake: it copies the plot without understanding the texture.
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A northern burden
Premalu feels like a story happening to ordinary young people. But like every other masaledar Bollywood film, Prem Keetanu adds spectacle to the affair. What college student has lived like Vishal? The film is essentially a Student of the Year minus Dharma budget.
When I watched the original film a month ago as a recent graduate, Sachin’s struggle to find a job resonated with me. That is the story most people connect with. Even when the characters arrange a Mini Cooper for a long drive, it has a sense and reason behind it.
But when Vishal goes on a road trip, it’s something out of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara on the Lucknow-Agra Expressway.
Sachin did not have to be a larger-than-life character. He joked with his friend, embarrassed himself, discussed relationships, and made stupid decisions. I watched Premalu in Hindi, and some emotion may have been lost in translation from Malayalam, but the conversations still felt real.
Even when directors remake their own films in Bollywood, it does not always work. That happened this year with Haiwaan, an adaptation of Priyadarshan’s 2016 Malayalam film Oppam, in which Mohanlal played the lead role. In Haiwaan, Saif Ali Khan plays the lead, while Akshay Kumar plays the antagonist portrayed by P Samuthirakani in the original. Oppam became one of the highest-grossing Malayalam films in 2016. But Haiwaan has not even earned its budget. I blame it on Bollywood masala.
The Hindi industry has a misconception about the way films should be made. It despises small details, ordinary clothes, inane conversations, insecurities, and awkward silences.
It’s as if Bollywood filmmakers carry a Hindi Man’s Burden to ‘improve’ the qualities that made the original work stand out. And the result is a film that looks polished, louder, and bigger, but fails to connect with its audience.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)