That background hum during the first forty minutes of Ragini MMS 2 isn't wind noise, though I checked three different soundbars to be sure. It's just a low-frequency drone buried somewhere in the mix that refuses to drop out between scenes, a tiny mechanical glitch that probably happened on a scoring stage in Andheri and got left in because nobody involved in the post-production pipeline cared enough to pull up Pro Tools and notch it out.

Bhushan Patel takes over directing duties from Ujwal Singh here, and he immediately decides that the found-footage gimmick of the first outing was a cage he'd rather set on fire than inhabit. Instead, we get a slick, high-gloss digital look that borrows heavily from the mid-budget studio horror coming out of Hollywood during the same window, specifically the kind of cold, blue-graded aesthetic James Wan popularized with Insidious. The camera tracks through empty corridors with a mechanical smoothness that drains the rooms of any actual dread, preferring to glide past shadows rather than hide anything inside them. It's not great, not bad, just there, moving because standing still would expose how thin the plotting really is once the exposition gets cleared out of the way.

Sunny Leone plays a fictionalized version of herself, or at least a cipher built out of public perception, a starlet brought onto a haunted set because the sleazy producer played by Pravin Dabas thinks a sex symbol will juice the box office numbers of his cheap exploitation flick. She spends most of the runtime looking mildly bored while wearing leather jackets and holding heavy objects, delivering lines in a flat, heavily dubbed Hindi that has all the emotional resonance of a safety manual read aloud by an uninterested intern. There is a strange kind of bravery in how little she tries to act, refusing to panic when the ghost shows up or scream when the CGI blood starts spraying from the walls, which accidentally makes her the most grounded person in the entire production. Beside her, Sandhya Mridul works overtime as a washed-up actress trying to reclaim her relevance, chewing through dialogue with a desperate intensity that highlights how everyone else on screen seems to be operating on half-sleep.

The soundtrack relies almost entirely on cheap jump scares triggered by sudden stings of electronic percussion, punctuated by a couple of chart-seeking tracks that drop into the narrative with the subtlety of a falling anvil. It’s a loud movie that constantly tells you when to feel something because the images on screen are rarely strong enough to do the heavy lifting on their own. The cinematography bathes every single frame in a turquoise-and-amber digital wash that makes the dilapidated mansion look less like a haunted ruin and more like a high-end furniture showroom after hours. You notice these things when the narrative starts dragging its feet in the second act, killing time with redundant hallway chases that go nowhere and pointless conversations between supporting players who exist solely to up the body count before the credits hit.

Bollywood movies have long had an awkward relationship with the horror genre, usually treating scares as an interruption between musical numbers and broad comic relief, and this sequel tries to correct that imbalance by leaning entirely into erotic thrills instead. That fusion of sex and supernatural dread was the entire hook of the first film, but here it feels sanded down and commercialized, packaged for a multiplex crowd that wants skin and cheap shocks without any of the transgressive grit that made the original low-budget experiment notable in the first place. Karan Mehra shows up as a nervous director who can't control his crew, and his scenes have a frantic, sweaty energy that feels closer to a workplace comedy than a ghost story, though nobody seems to have told the editor to trim the reaction shots that linger a beat or two too long on his bewildered face.

Divya Dutta arrives late in the narrative as a paranormal investigator with a raspy voice and a penchant for stating the obvious, and her performance is so loud and theatrical it belongs in an entirely different movie, perhaps a touring stage melodrama from the nineteen-eighties. She hams it up with a level of enthusiasm that feels almost embarrassing to watch, waving crystals around and shouting about negative energies while the lighting crew flashes blue gels in her face to signal that the spirit world is getting restless. Hindi films often struggle to integrate supernatural lore without resorting to lazy exposition dumps, and Dutta is handed the heaviest lifting of all, explaining rules about vengeful spirits that the script breaks five minutes later for the sake of another CGI tentacle attack.

There is an underlying cynicism to the whole enterprise that makes it hard to care about the fate of anyone on screen, because every single character is written as either a predator or a victim of their own shallow ambitions. Dabas plays his slimy filmmaker with a oily smirk that never shifts, giving us a caricature of industry opportunism that feels more like a sketch than a fully realized person. He's just another obstacle for Leone to ignore as she wanders through rooms where the wallpaper is peeling in suspiciously digital ways. When the final confrontation arrives, involving fire and digital smoke that looks like it was rendered on a mid-range laptop circa 2012, the resolution feels completely arbitrary, a foregone conclusion reached after ninety minutes of style-over-substance padding that forgets to be scary about ten minutes after it starts.

Hindi cinema has produced far better atmospheric chillers over the years, and even within the realm of cheap exploitation cinema, this particular entry lacks the raw, unhinged energy that makes Ram Gopal Varma's early horror output worth revisiting despite its flaws. It feels designed by a committee that watched a few American ghost stories over a long weekend and decided to replicate the surface aesthetics without understanding how tension is actually built in a scene. The digital effects are rubbery, the sound design is a headache-inducing wall of noise, and the central performance is less a piece of acting and more an exercise in brand management.

That background hum finally stops during the third act, replaced by the roar of digital fire, but by then the damage to my patience was already done, leaving me with nothing to remember except the sight of a very expensive leather jacket getting ruined by fake blood that looked suspiciously like watered-down ketchup.