Last year, remembering his friend and filmmaker Kundan Shah, who had just passed away, director Sudhir Mishra took a dig at what “dark film” has now come to mean.

“It was dark before dark became a word used to describe the lack of imagination,” wrote Mishra while talking about one of Shah’s banned series of films made for Doordarshan. Little did he know that would be the key failure of his latest offering Daas Dev, arguably the weakest one in his body of work.

His contemporary dark take on the much-rehashed Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s 1917 Bengali novel Devdas shows an acute lack of imagination in translating narrative ambition on screen. In putting together bits of  Sarat Chandra’s novel, Shakespeare’ s Hamlet and a slice of family history centred around his late grandfather into one meandering plot, the film is lost as an entity beyond identifiable fragments.

Set in the hinterland of UP’s power politics and alleys of power brokers in Delhi, the film straddles the parallel worlds of personal obsessions and cold logic of politics – faltering in capturing either of the tales.

Dev Chauhan, played by Rahul Bhatt (last noticed in Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly), plays a self-destructive alcoholic and drug addict  who inherits power play as an accidental successor in a political family.

Opening with his father’s death in 1997 (which is revealed as an intrigue quite late) and then playing out 20 years later, Dev’s inexplicable miseries revolve around love, loss and longing for his childhood love-turned-political rival Paro (played insipidly by Richa Chadha) and finding the comforting shoulders of high-end prostitute and political fixer Chandni (played by Aditi Rao Hydari).

Overpopulated by characters in a chaotic narrative and random sprinkling of themes ranging from triangular love and dam politics to political battles of land acquisition and compensation for farmers, the film is unsure about its narrative core.

Besides the triumvirate needed for any retelling of Devdas, Mishra has a cast which looks like a promising acting pool but fails to deliver on screen. Barring Saurabh Shukla as Dev’s idealist-turned-expedient uncle Awdesh and Vineet Kumar Singh playing the political apprentice Milan, none of the performances go beyond, going through badly written scenes.

The film would go down as forgettable appearances for Sohaila Kapur Dev’s mother Sushila, Anil George as Paro’s father and Vipin Sharma playing the political Dev’s political rival Ramashray Shukla.

For a director who got the emergency-era political milieu right in Hazaaron Khwahishein Aisi, Mishra fails to create the setting for a political drama. The film ends up offering the clichés of heartland politics which are typical of metro India’s flawed understanding of the region.

As if he took the dark theme quite literally, the film has no respect for sunlight, being mostly shot in dimly-lit rooms and environs, usually preferring night for drama. Poor writing is extended to lyrics of a few background musical numbers in the film – all equally forgettable.

Mishra doesn’t wrestle with Bollywood reasoning in a hurry to finish the film with a scene that has Das, who murdered many, transforming into Dev just a year later in the final scene – a convenient exit route for a shoddy script.

As all Devdas films (and the original novel too), the film doesn’t evoke empathy for any of its characters. There is no explanation for the appeal or even likeability of a languishing, frail and self-destructive hedonistic figure for women who know what they are doing. It’s a key flaw of characterisation in the novel which subsequent cinematic adaptations have failed to address. Daas Dev is the latest and perhaps the most bland of those failures.

Mishra’s much awaited return to the screen only reveals a filmmaker whose powers are on the wane. He may like to refute that with his next.