The sound design in the first twenty minutes of Murder 3 leans so heavily on the creak of old floorboards that you might briefly forget you are watching a psychological thriller made for the multiplex. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how the house in Lonavala sounds less like a modern architectural marvel and more like a pirate ship caught in a gale every time Randeep Hooda walks from the kitchen to the foyer. Hindi films of a certain budget have long struggled with foley work that tries to manufacture suspense out of domestic carpentry, and Vishesh Bhatt’s directorial debut within the franchise inherits this exact noisy tic. You sit there waiting for the plot to kick in while the audio mixer treats every footstep like a thunderclap, which establishes a strange, irritable mood long before anyone goes missing. That opening stretch sets up a dynamic of domestic unease that feels closer to a haunted house picture than an official remake of The Hidden Face, dragging the source material through a swamp of murky acoustics and lingering reaction shots that hold for one beat too long.

Vishesh Bhatt replaced Anurag Basu and Mohit Suri behind the monitor, and if I'm honest, the downgrade in visual panache is noticeable right from the first reel. The screenplay by Mahesh Bhatt keeps the structural trick of the original Colombian thriller where the protagonist’s new girlfriend moves into a sprawling, isolated mansion only to discover a panic room built by the architect-owner’s previous, mysteriously vanished lover. Yet the pacing lacks the breathless spiral that made Murder 2 such a ruthless crowd-pleaser, opting instead for long, sluggish stretches of dialogue that circle the drain of bruised male ego. Hooda plays Vikram, a fashion photographer whose charm comes with a very obvious expiration date, and he wears his jealousy like a cheap cardigan that keeps snagging on door handles. He isn't given much room to maneuver between brooding and yelling, forcing him to rely on the same intense stare he used in Saheb, Biwi And Gangster, though here it feels recycled and tired by the time the interval hits.

Aditi Rao Hydari carries the heavy lifting of the first half as Roshni, the woman who vanishes into the very walls of the house, and she manages to make confinement look genuinely claustrophobic without chewing the scenery. She spends large blocks of screen time trapped behind a two-way mirror, watching her replacement live out her domestic routine, and her facial expressions have to do the work of a monologue while she starves in the dark. It’s an exercise in sheer physical endurance that she pulls off with surprising grit, communicating terror and creeping madness through twitches and shallow breathing that register clearly in the tight framing. Sara Loren steps in as Nisha, the lounge singer who moves into the house and quickly realizes things are falling apart, but her performance oscillates wildly between sultry confidence and sudden, unearned panic that makes her hard to root for when the twists finally start dropping into the narrative.

The cinematography by Pravin Bhatt bathes everything in a perpetual twilight that tries to look expensive but mostly ends up looking muddy, hiding the production design under layers of amber gel and digital grain. Every frame seems desperate to convince you that this is high art, forgetting that thrillers usually require enough light to let us see the actors' eyes when they lie to each other. The soundtrack, composed chiefly by Pritam and Anupam Roy, features the sort of sweeping, melancholic ballads that Bollywood movies practically mandate, yet they arrive at the absolute worst narrative junctures. A song will start swelling on the soundtrack just as Nisha is investigating a weird noise in the basement, completely defusing any tension the scene managed to build through sheer editorial pacing. It is a persistent rhythm in commercial hindi cinema that rarely trusts silence to do the heavy lifting, preferring to drown out actorly hesitation with a soaring vocal track about heartbreak.

The core theme of the picture keeps circling back to the suffocating nature of surveillance and the way romantic jealousy turns domestic spaces into literal prisons. Vikram built the panic room not out of a desire for safety, but as a twisted monument to his own paranoia, a cage designed to test the absolute limits of female loyalty. When Roshni ends up locked inside that vault due to a dropped key and a misplaced sense of cruel theater on her own part, the film accidentally stumbles into a darker commentary about the games lovers play to validate their insecurities. Nobody comes out of this looking noble, least of all the protagonist, who moves on to a new relationship with unseemly haste while his former partner rots behind concrete walls. The script treats this moral rot with a strange shrug of indifference, treating the psychological torture not as an unforgivable crime, but as a messy bump in the road of modern dating.

As the narrative stumbles toward its predictable resolution, the traps set by the screenplay spring with a distinct lack of urgency that drains the final confrontation of any real stakes. Nisha discovers the truth, confronts the architect, and the film simply ends on a note of ambiguous cruelty that feels earned only in the sense that everyone on screen has behaved with maximum selfishness for two hours. There is no grand moral reckoning, no sweeping ideological takeaway about the darkness residing in ordinary men, just a door closing on a messy situation. You are left with the lingering echo of those creaky wooden floors from the opening sequence, wondering why so much technical fuss was made over a narrative that ultimately amounts to little more than a prolonged, dimly lit parlor trick.