The sound design in the opening ten minutes of Betaal relies so heavily on a wet, squelching thud that I found myself checking my own boots to see if I had stepped in something. It is a small thing, but it bugged me throughout the first episode, this constant acoustic reminder that someone in the post-production audio suite discovered the fleshy impact preset and refused to let it go. Netflix has spent a fortune trying to crack the Indian horror market with various degrees of slickness, yet they keep handing their genre experiments to directors who mistake relentless auditory assault for atmosphere. Patrick Graham and Nikhil Mahajan co-direct this four-part series with the subtlety of a pneumatic drill. They do not build tension so much as they bludgeon you with it, relying on sudden, jarring cuts to black and orchestral stings that arrive when characters are merely walking down a slightly damp corridor.

The script comes out swinging with a heavy-handed allegory about corporate greed versus indigenous rights, setting up a clash between a ruthless highway contractor and a remote village guarding a cursed tunnel. Viineet Kumar plays Sirohi, the head of a private security outfit working for the contractor, wearing the dead-eyed scowl of a man who has realized halfway through shooting that his character arc is essentially just running from point A to point B while shouting commands. Kumar is a genuinely good actor, as anyone who watched Mukkabaaz can attest, but here he is reduced to a vessel for exposition and grimaced determination. He spends most of his screen time looking like he wants to apologize to the supporting cast for the terrible dialogue they are all forced to yell over the sound of gunfire and heavy breathing. When he tries to inject some moral ambiguity into his corporate stooge, the direction steps in with another flashback to his past military traumas that feels entirely perfunctory.

Opposite him is Aahana Kumra as Ahana, a deputy commandant of the counter-insurgency squad who switches allegiances the moment the red-eyed British zombie soldiers start crawling out of the woodwork. Kumra tries to anchor the madness with a fierce physical presence, gripping her assault rifle as though she might actually shoot the bad CGI if it gets too close to the lens. The supporting cast features Suchitra Pillai as the villainous corporate boss who chews the scenery with such enthusiasm that you half-expect her to start demanding sacrifices in corporate boardrooms, and honestly, that might have been more interesting than the generic colonial curse we actually get. The dialogue suffers from that peculiar disease afflicting many recent Hindi web series where every single line sounds like it was translated from an American comic book by way of a corporate diversity memo. Nobody talks like a human being; they deliver declarations of intent while standing half-shadowed in tunnels lit by magically persistent emergency lamps.

Let us talk about the redcoats. The titular Betaal are British East India Company soldiers who were cursed during the Sepoy Mutiny, and their realization as digital and practical effects hybrids is, if I am honest, a bit muddy. They look like extras who wandered off the set of a low-budget historical drama and got caught in a vat of corn syrup and charcoal dust. The creature design lacks the tactile horror of something like 28 Days Later, where the speed of the infected created genuine panic, because these zombies move with the predictable lumber of video game NPCs waiting for their trigger animation to finish. Tanmay Dhanania pops up as a bureaucratic lackey whose dubbing is so egregiously out of sync in two separate scenes that I wondered if they had recorded his lines in a completely different room using a disconnected headset. The cinematography by Tanuja Das loves a good desaturated blue filter, draining the Indian landscape of anything resembling warmth until every exterior shot looks like it was captured through a dirty car windshield on a rainy Tuesday.

Bollywood movies have historically struggled with pure horror because they prefer emotional melodramatics to the cold, mechanic isolation required to make an audience truly scared, and Betaal fails for almost the exact opposite reason. It refuses to slow down long enough for us to care about the people getting disemboweled in the dark. The action scenes chop through geography with frantic editing that hides the lack of stunt choreography behind twenty cuts every three seconds, leaving you with a headache rather than a rush. There are moments when the camera tracks behind Kumar as he clears a room, and you can see the potential for a tight, claustrophobic survival thriller, but the moment is immediately ruined by a sluggish CGI ghoul stumbling into frame with all the menace of a damp laundry bag. It is a pacing issue as much as a conceptual one, because the show refuses to let its own mythology breathe before throwing another horde of supernatural redcoats at the screen. Hindi movies that dabble in the supernatural often forget that dread requires silence, not just an escalating wall of orchestral noise that drowns out whatever tension the performers are trying to build with their eyes.

By the time the narrative limps toward its final confrontation involving an ancient evil and a dam construction site, the exhaustion is total. The thematic weight of the British colonial past colliding with modern corporate exploitation gets crushed under the weight of so many video game tropes and generic jump scares. There is no sense of discovery in the horror, no creeping dread that sinks into your bones, just a succession of loud noises and muddy battle sequences that blur together until you cannot tell one soldier from the next. The series wraps up with a sequel hook that feels less like a promise and more like a threat, leaving the viewer to wonder why a cast this capable was stranded in such a damp, noisy hole. You leave the experience with the distinct impression of having sat through a very long commercial for a video game that was cancelled during production.