Deepak Dobriyal chewing on a mouthful of local slang while holding a flashlight in the middle of Arunachal Pradesh does more heavy lifting for Bhediya than any amount of CGI fur ever could. Amar Kaushik directs this thing like he is trying to catch a bus that is already pulling away, which turns out to be precisely the kind of frantic energy a Bollywood monster movie needs to keep from feeling like a software demo reel. Niren Bhatt wrote the screenplay, and if I am honest, he spent way too much time setting up franchise logistics instead of letting the characters just breathe in the damp forest air.

Varun Dhawan plays Bhaskar, a Mumbai contractor sent up north to clear land for a road, and he starts the movie as an insufferable corporate prick who drinks fancy bottled water and insults the locals. When a stray mutt bites him on the backside in the dead of night, the physical transformation hits him slowly through fever dreams, chest hair sprouting in odd clumps, cravings for raw chicken, senses sharpening to an absurd degree where he can hear a tea kettle boiling three valleys over. Dhawan doesn't always manage to sell the tragic weight of the curse, but he is genuinely great during the chaotic transition scenes where his limbs twitch like he forgot how human skeletons are supposed to work.

Kriti Sanon plays Dr. Anika, the veterinarian who tends to his bizarre medical anomalies with a deadpan expression that suggests she has seen weirder things happen in Ziro Valley before breakfast. She doesn't get nearly enough screen time to anchor the romantic side plot the marketing department promised us, which is fine because the chemistry works better as a series of exasperated eye-rolls anyway. Abhishek Banerjee and Paalin Kabak fill out the crew as the hapless cousin and the clueless local guide, generating most of the actual laughs through rapid-fire banter that occasionally overlaps so fast you miss half the jokes on first listen.

Jishnu Bhattacharjee shoots the dense canopy of Arunachal Pradesh with a camera that refuses to sit still, swooping through branches and tracking characters at ground level with a breathless urgency that makes the geography feel alive. The visual effects team had a mountain of work to do, and while the titular wolf looks completely rendered in a few wider shots, the close-ups use practical makeup and lighting tricks that ground the creature in the physical space of the frame. Sachin-Jigar provide a soundtrack that leans heavily on local folk instruments mixed with driving basslines, though I could have done without the third-reprise of the main track during an action sequence where we already knew what was happening.

There is an eco-fable beating somewhere underneath all the monster-movie mechanics, a clear-eyed look at how mainland development bulldozes indigenous cultures and tribal lands without a second thought. It shares a certain shaggy-dog DNA with Amar Kaushik’s earlier Stree, though this one lacks the tight, claustrophobic village dread that made that film feel like an actual folk tale told around a fire. The tonal shifts can be jarring, bouncing from goofy slapstick comedy about howling at the moon straight into heavy-handed monologues about deforestation and corporate greed.

Hindi films have a historically terrible track record when it comes to creature features, usually defaulting to cheap rubber suits and recycled Hollywood creature tropes that embarrassment washes over long before the interval. Bhediya sidesteps that trap by leaning hard into regional specificity, casting local actors in supporting roles and shooting on location instead of sticking everyone in front of a green screen in Film City. It is a messy, overstuffed, occasionally brilliant piece of genre filmmaking that stumbles whenever it tries to explain its own mythology too seriously.

The supporting cast gets the best lines, particularly when they start arguing about regional stereotypes and mainland ignorance without sounding like an after-school special. That small town dynamic keeps the movie anchored when the computer-generated chaos threatens to take over the screen entirely. You leave the theater thinking about the throwaway gags and the texture of the forest floor rather than the vague CGI showdown that resolves the plot.

Arun Dhawan might not have the dramatic gravitas to pull off a full-blown lycanthropic tragedy on par with American Werewolf in London, but he brings a puppyish enthusiasm that works surprisingly well for a man waking up naked in the mud covered in sheep wool. The editing in the second half gets a bit choppy, losing spatial awareness during the frantic nocturnal chases through the tea gardens, yet the sheer momentum of the production carries you past the rough patches. Bollywood movies usually treat visual effects as an afterthought tossed in during post-production to pad out the runtime, so seeing a studio project commit this hard to physical space and creature design feels like a genuine novelty.

The script needed another pass to smooth out the transition between the environmental messaging and the slapstick werewolf antics, because right now those two halves are glued together with a lot of heavy breathing and exposition. Still, the atmosphere does the heavy lifting, creating a weirdly specific corner of the country that feels lived-in and damp and dangerous. You end up forgiving the clumsy pacing simply because the people on screen look like they are having a ridiculous amount of fun bringing this bizarre folklore to life.