Aapthamitra

This the best movie I've ever seen in my life and the acting of Soundarya is speechless 😶 omg I got goosebumps watching her ... I've seen this movie more than 100 times and whenever I wacth it feels like watching for the first time... Actress soundarya should be awarded Oscar for this....

Aapthamitra is one of the excellent story followed by amazing direction and execution of script. The story is not uncommon where a family who moves into a bungalow is affected by the horrific events occurred during the old age times.

The famous acting duo in Kannada industry of Late. Vishnuvardhan and Dwarakish was treat to watch. The twists are finely tuned in different parts of the movie. The narration of then king-owned bungalow and events is very well executed. The music and songs are good too.

Overall, the genre is one of my loved things and that in Kannada movie is just a treat to watch.

Very thrilling suspense, and good message movie. Entertainment movie.

It was a remake but with fantastic changes.... This film has so many differences as compared to original.... This is a super, marvelous and fantastic movie...

Aapthamitra (Apthamitra) is one of those rare remakes that doesn't just copy-paste a classic but bends it toward a different audience and star persona. Based on the Malayalam masterpiece Manichitrathazhu, this 2004 Kannada psychological horror film follows engineer Ramesh and his wife Ganga, who buy an old Mysore palace against the advice of senior relative Shivananda Sharma, because everyone believes the spirit of a long-dead dancer, Nagavalli, is trapped in a locked room. Naturally, Ganga's curiosity and resentment toward "forbidden rooms" lead her to open that door with the help of young house help Sowmya. From that moment, the palace slips from family melodrama into a pattern of strange events: night-time singing and dancing, mysterious shadows, physical attacks on Ramesh and other relatives, and a growing conviction that Nagavalli's curse has awakened.

The surface plot works perfectly as a ghost story. The backstory of Nagavalli, a court dancer from Andhra who was kept by Raja Vijaya Rajendra Bahaddur and secretly loved the musician Ramanatha, gives the film its gothic spine. On Durgashtami, the king discovered the affair, beheaded Ramanatha and burned Nagavalli alive; she died vowing to return on the same festival day to burn the king in revenge. When similar dates and spaces repeat in the present-Ramesh owning the palace, a new romance between his cousin Vani and dance teacher Mahadev living behind the palace, and Ganga wandering the old dancer's room-the past and present start to overlap. The audience is encouraged to see Ganga as either the victim of a curse or the next vessel for Nagavalli's fury.

What makes the story more than a simple haunting is the entry of Dr Vijay, Ramesh's friend and a psychiatrist portrayed in a double role by Vishnuvardhan as both Vijay and the historical Raja. Vijay arrives half as clown, half as investigator: he jokes, teases relatives, and appears to treat the ghost story lightly, but he is quietly cataloguing who knows the songs, who can dance, who has access to the locked room, and who is emotionally unstable. At the same time, the family brings in Acharya Ramachandra Shastri, a respected religious exorcist, to do the "proper" ritual response. The tension between "call the doctor" and "call the priest" runs under almost every major incident.

The key characters are written to sit on this fault-line between tradition and psychology. Ganga, played by Soundarya, is an educated, high-spirited woman who doesn't like old taboos and is intensely drawn to Nagavalli's story, almost treating the dancer like an alter ego. Her husband Ramesh is the classic rational male who believes buying a palace proves his success; he cares for his wife but is emotionally tone-deaf, slow to recognise her isolation and inner turmoil. Sowmya, the house help's granddaughter, is the easy scapegoat: young, lower status, and often near the scene, she becomes the "obvious culprit" when people need someone to blame. Acharya represents institutional religion-respected, theatrical, able to command fear. Vijay bridges both worlds, understanding that the family will accept a ritual far more easily than a textbook diagnosis.

The big reveal follows the same spine as Manichitrathazhu: Vijay eventually explains that there is no ghost in the literal sense. Ganga has developed dissociative identity disorder; her second personality believes itself to be Nagavalli, replaying the old story of betrayal and revenge. In that state, she sings, dances, attacks Ramesh as a stand-in for the king and sabotages Vani and Mahadev's engagement because she sees Mahadev as a modern Ramanatha who must belong only to her. One of the most uncomfortable sequences, where Ganga accuses Mahadev of molestation after a physical struggle, reads very differently once the second personality is revealed: it's both a possessive lover trying to "keep" her man and a deeply sick mind weaponising social notions of female honour to destroy a rival.

Thematically, the film sits at an intersection of mental illness, patriarchy and belief. On one level, Aapthamitra keeps the core idea that what looks like a haunting is actually untreated trauma and split identity. On another level, it treats the old story of Nagavalli and the Raja as the moral centre of gravity: a brutal patriarch who controlled a woman's body and love life created the conditions for her rage to echo across generations. The palace itself is like a fossilised crime scene, and the locked room is a physical metaphor for repressed memory and guilt. When Ganga opens that door, she is not only being naughty; she is walking into a space soaked in gendered violence and unfinished grief.

Cinematography and visual design underline this. The Mysore palace is shot with wide, slightly exaggerated frames that emphasise its emptiness and the distance between characters, especially Ganga and the rest of the family. The "Nagavalli room" is rich with colour and texture-lamps, veils, portraits-turning every night sequence into a half-stage, half-dream where psychological horror and performance merge. The Durgashtami climax is particularly striking: firelight, classical dance and ritual architecture are used to create a sense of mythic repetition as Vijay, disguised as the Raja, allows himself to be symbolically "burned" so that the second personality can believe her vow is fulfilled.

Compared to the Malayalam original, Aapthamitra clearly pushes toward a more masala commercial register. Manichitrathazhu is quieter, more domestic and more strictly psychological; its Dr Sunny feels like an eccentric professional who slowly earns everyone's trust. Here, Vijay is a full-fledged star vehicle for Vishnuvardhan, introduced with an exterior fight scene and given hero moments that go beyond the needs of the case. The film also leans slightly more into the possibility of the supernatural-through Acharya's elevated status, more elaborate rituals and a visual language that sometimes encourages the audience to think "maybe there is something beyond illness," even though the script ultimately endorses Vijay's diagnosis. The songs and comic beats are more numerous than in the original, which makes the tone looser and sometimes undercuts the suffocating tension that made Manichitrathazhu feel almost clinically precise.

From a neutral perspective, this shift has both strengths and weaknesses. On the positive side, Aapthamitra is an extremely accessible entry point for viewers who like horror but also expect big-star energy, songs and humour from Kannada cinema of that era. The pacing is brisk, the mystery is easy to follow, and Soundarya's performance in the dual Ganga/Nagavalli mode has an operatic intensity that works well with the larger-than-life palette. As a remake strategy, P. Vasu's decision to retain the psychological core while layering in more overt horror and spectacle clearly worked with audiences-the film became a major hit, running a year in some theatres and effectively launching the "remake train" that led to Chandramukhi and Bhool Bhulaiyaa.

On the downside, some of the subtlety of the original is lost. The extra hero worship around Vijay and the more exaggerated exorcism scenes slightly dilute the disturbing realism of a family misreading severe mental illness as possession. The added commercial elements-intro fight, broader comedy, romantic hints with Sowmya-can feel like side quests when you're invested in Ganga's inner collapse. At times, the film seems torn between wanting to confront the audience with the uncomfortable idea that "the ghost is a symptom" and wanting to reassure them with familiar horror tropes and a near-infallible saviour figure.

Overall, Aapthamitra stands as a strong, regionally grounded reinterpretation of a classic structure: it keeps the architecture of Manichitrathazhu-the cursed house, the tragic dancer, the curious wife, the sceptical husband, the clownish but brilliant psychiatrist and the ritual of symbolic revenge-while dressing it in the colours, star power and tonal blend of early-2000s Kannada cinema. It may not match the original in psychological nuance, but as a psychological horror entertainer with a surprisingly serious core about women's trauma, belief and the danger of misdiagnosed illness, it earns its place in the long "Nagavalli universe" and remains a fascinating companion piece for anyone who loves tracing how the same story mutates across languages and film cultures.