Exotic Sweden. Road trip. Music ’n’ dance. Beach parties and bar jaunts. Two girls out there who just wanna have fun. Jia Aur Jia ticks all the boxes — including that ‘I want to buy a ticket right now’ trailer — but far from packing your bags and dying to head out for a trip with your girlfriends, this film (if one can call it that) will only make you desperately eye the exit door.

Yes, there’s no easy way to put it — Jia Aur Jia could possibly be the worst film of the year so far, sitting pretty at the top of a list that includes duds like Half Girlfriend and Raabta.

Jia Aur Jia’s smartness ends at the title itself. The idea of putting two women with the same name but different personalities on a budget trip in a foreign locale may have sounded like a winner on paper, but the film — plot to performance, screenplay to song — is such a slog that you are left wondering how it was green-lit in the first place.

The story, a one-line idea stretched to an interminable hour-and-a-half — 93 minutes haven’t felt this long in a long, long time — has uptight corporate honcho Jia Venkatraman (Richa Chadha) forced to “twin-share” her Scandinavian holiday with wild-child Jia Garewal (Kalki Koechlin). Stereotypes abound, with Richa’s Jia painted almost as a neurotic control freak with a frown plastered firmly on her brow while Kalki’s Jia hops, skips and jumps around like a bunny on a permanent diet of Duracell batteries.

Budgetary constraints compel the two to bunk up together — though the extravagant parties and frequent shopping sprees don’t really spell out ‘cash crunch’ — and you settle into your plex seat hoping that their run-ins would at least translate to some ha-has. But the jokes don’t land, the emotions fail to touch a chord and the chemistry between Richa and Kalki — otherwise fine actors with some phenomenal work dotting their filmography — looks terribly forced, whether sharing sob-sob life stories or guzzling down bottle after bottle of vodka. Things get worse with the perfunctory male character thrown in — debutant Arslan Goni pops up as an Indo-Swede hunk called Vasu Krishna Bergman (Ingrid and Ingmar fans, keep calm and carry on).

It’s maybe not fair to expect a genuine film on girl bonding to come out of a man’s pen and Mudassar Aziz — who wrote and directed the immensely watchable Happy Bhag Jayegi last year — falters badly here. The road trip, mostly used as a metaphor for self-discovery in films here and there, doesn’t even end up being fun, with a yawn-a-minute backstory and the all-too-familiar trope of a terminal illness only adding to the torture.

At best a web-series — the shoddy cinematography by Pravin Suryavanshi does afford the look and feel of a home video — Jia Aur Jia limps to a predictable end, but not before the audience has been subjected to a tortuous liver transplant angle and an inane church wedding, with a horribly-gone-wrong remixed version of Mohd Rafi’s Jiya o jiya from the 1961 Dev Anand-Asha Parekh starrer Jab Pyar Kisi Se Hota Hai functioning as the final nail in the coffin.

Richa and Kalki will have to live with this mistake called Jia Aur Jia in their filmography, but you don’t really have to. Get a glimpse of Sweden instead on TLC and do a Bridesmaids DVD rerun. You are welcome.