Kartik Aaryan spends the first twenty minutes of Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 wearing a leather jacket that looks like it cost more than the lighting budget for the village flashback scenes, and if I'm honest, that tells you almost everything you need to know about the aesthetic priorities at play here. When Anees Bazmee took over the director's chair from Priyadarshan, he didn't try to replicate the psychological claustrophobia or the slow-burn dread of the 2007 original, opting instead to blow the doors off the mansion and turn the whole exercise into a loud, brightly lit carnival ride that happens to feature a few ghosts. You miss the subtle framing of the old house, the way hallways used to feel longer and shadows used to actually hide things, because here everything is caught in a harsh digital glare that flattens out the spooky bits. The screenplay, credited to Akash Kaushik and Farhad Samji, treats narrative logic as an optional luxury, preferring to lurch drunkenly between broad slapstick involving geriatric uncles and sudden bursts of CGI-heavy possession lore. It is a loud movie, occasionally too loud for its own good, rattling the multiplex seats with percussion heavy remixes of tunes we all already know by heart.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that sets in when a comedy feels the need to signal every single joke three seconds before it lands, and Aaryan’s character Rooh Baba is the chief offender in this regard, working overtime to charm a camera that is already entirely in love with him. He lacks the manic, desperate energy that Akshay Kumar brought to the original psychiatrist role, replacing it with an easygoing, Instagram-ready swagger that feels engineered to play well in reels rather than scenes. He smiles a lot. He poses with his hair falling across his forehead just so. Kiara Advani gets the trickier, more thankless assignment of playing the girl caught in the middle of a familial property dispute who may or may not be housing a centuries-old spirit inside her ribs, and she plays it with a generalized, glossy panic that never quite settles into actual fear. It is a functional performance that hits the required emotional beats without ever bruising the surface. She screams on cue, she stares blankly into mirrors, and she wears heavy traditional silks while running down long corridors as if she were late for a flight out of Terminal 3.

Then Tabu walks onto the screen and casually eats everyone else's lunch, shifting the entire center of gravity of the production with a single, weary tilt of her head. She plays Anjulika, or Manjulika, or both, and the script gives her the heavy lifting of carrying whatever dramatic weight this chaotic contraption possesses, which she does by anchoring her performance in cold, unblinking stillness. When she looks at Aaryan, you can actually feel the temperature in the room drop twenty degrees, a feat made more impressive by the fact that she is usually surrounded by garish curtains and extras in bad Halloween makeup. It is hard to overstate how much her presence rescues the enterprise from sinking entirely into the sort of generic goofiness that plagues modern mainstream Hindi films when they try to blend horror with family comedy. She treats the ridiculous mythology of the haunted room with absolute, deadpan seriousness, and that commitment makes the surrounding nonsense somewhat more digestible, even when the visual effects department starts hurling actors around the wire-work like ragdolls.

The cinematography by Manu Anand relies heavily on a saturated color palette that makes rural Rajasthan look like a luxury resort brochure, which works against the purported scariness of the premise on a fundamental level. You cannot take a haunted mansion seriously when the chandeliers are polished to a high mirror shine and every dark corner is illuminated by stray key lights that seem to emanate from nowhere in particular. The background score borrows aggressively from the iconic Ami Je Tomar motif originally composed by M. M. Keeravani, twisting it into various dubstep and orchestral arrangements that hammer the nostalgia button over and over until it stops making a sound. It is a common trap in contemporary franchise filmmaking, leaning on the ghost of a better movie to legitimize its own hollow center, though credit must be given where it is due for the sheer audacity of the climactic dance-off. It is bizarrely staged, entirely nonsensical in terms of plot mechanics, and yet undeniably watchable in a trainwreck sort of way.

There is a supporting character, a frantic priest played with excessive volume by Rajpal Yadav, whose dialogue delivery is clearly dubbed by someone standing three feet away from a cheap microphone in a windowless room, and it is a small mechanical flaw that kept pulling me out of the movie every single time he opened his mouth. It is a small thing, sure, but these little technical oversights accumulate over two and a half hours, wearing down your patience until even the most well-meaning gag feels like a chore. The film wants to say something about ancestral trauma and patriarchy within the traditional joint family structure, nodding vaguely in the direction of something substantive before getting distracted by another pratfall or a CGI raven flying toward the lens. Bollywood has struggled for years to figure out how to do horror-comedy without leaning entirely on vulgarity or excessive CGI, and while this entry avoids the absolute bottom tier of the genre, it still feels like it was assembled in a boardroom by focus-group data analysts.

Comparisons to Priyadarshan's 2007 film are inevitable and largely unfair, but the production invites them by using the exact same tune and setting, so the audience is primed to measure the distance between the two experiences. That earlier movie had Vidya Balan selling the dual personality angle with a terrifying, wide-eyed intensity that felt genuinely unsettling on a late-night television broadcast, whereas here everything is smoothed out for mass consumption. No one is allowed to be genuinely ugly or frightening for long before a punchline arrives to reset the tension, neutering any threat the spirit might pose to the household. It is watchable on a lazy Sunday afternoon when your brain has already turned to mush, but the moment the credits roll, the entire experience evaporates from your skull like morning mist over a manicured lawn.