Anushka Sharma has a very particular way of tilting her head when she wants to look unhinged, and if I'm honest, it worked better in NH10 than it does here, though the makeup department deserves some kind of hazard pay for what they put her through in Pari. The film starts with a thud that sounds less like a car accident and more like a heavy sack of wet laundry hitting an asphalt driveway, and honestly, the sound design stays that clunky for a good twenty minutes before everyone finally figures out where the microphones are. We are dropped into a soggy, aggressively grey Kolkata that looks like it was shot through a dirty mason jar, populated by people who whisper their dialogue as if the entire city is trying to sleep off a heavy lunch. Parambrata Chatterjee plays Arnab, a man whose default facial expression suggests he has just smelled something slightly unpleasant on the sole of his shoe, and he spends the first half of the movie wandering around rainy lanes looking mildly confused by everything happening in front of him. It’s a strange beast, this movie, wearing the heavy overcoat of Hollywood supernatural horror while stubbornly dragging around the emotional baggage of a hundred melodramas that came before it in the broader landscape of Hindi films. Prosit Roy directs with an earnestness that often borders on the comical, treating every jump scare with the solemnity of a state funeral, lingering on dripping faucets and swinging lightbulbs until you just want to reach into the projector and give the thing a shove.

The screenplay feels like it was written on napkins during a cross-country train ride and then accidentally scrambled when the wind caught them at a station stop, leaving logic to fend for itself in the ditch. Characters appear out of nowhere to deliver ominous warnings about ancient cults that worship goats or demons or some poorly defined combination of the two, and then they vanish just as quickly, never to be mentioned again even when half the apartment block burns down. Rajat Kapoor shows up as a fanatic with a scarred face and a raspy growl, playing Professor Qasim like he's auditioning for a touring company production of Frankenstein that ran out of budget for the electrodes by the second act. He has this one monologue about black magic and supernatural genetics that goes on for roughly ten minutes, and every time he pauses for dramatic effect, you can hear a ceiling fan whirring off-camera in a way that pulls you right out of the dark, damp mood they spent forty minutes building. The logic governing the spirit world here is rubbery at best, stretching to accommodate whatever sudden plot twist the writers needed to survive the third act without having to explain why nobody called the local police about the chained woman in the back room.

Yet whenever Sharma is on screen, the movie manages to generate a weird, bruised kind of energy that almost makes up for the script's gaping plot holes. She plays Rukhsana, a feral creature found shackled in a dilapidated hut, and she communicates mostly through guttural clicks, sudden lunges, and wide-eyed stares that owe a massive debt to Takako Fuji in The Grudge, but she commits to the physical awkwardness with a total lack of vanity. Her limbs bend at wrong angles, her hair is plastered to her face in greasy clumps, and she eats raw meat with a concentration that is genuinely unsettling to watch on a Friday night when you're halfway through a tub of popcorn. There is a quiet scene in a kitchen where she discovers the concept of running water, and for about thirty seconds, Sharma strips away all the monster movie trappings to show us a terrified animal trying to figure out if the world is safe enough to let its guard down for a single second. It is a good moment, perhaps the only truly grounded moment in a two-hour runtime that otherwise prefers to shout at you through cheap sound effects and sudden flashes of lightning.

The cinematography relies heavily on a muddy color palette that makes every room look like it was painted with wet peat and old tea leaves, which works for the damp atmosphere until you realize you can't actually see what's happening in the shadows during the climax. Arghya Tarak lights the actors with harsh overhead bulbs that throw deep, unflattering racoon eyes across everyone's cheekbones, making even the romantic interludes look like crime scene reconstructions. Speaking of the romance, the budding bond between Arnab and Rukhsana defies belief in ways that stretch even the most generous suspension of disbelief, transforming from a hit-and-run rescue mission into a domestic drama about a guy sharing his toast with a supernatural entity who might also be a serial killer. The soundtrack by Anupam Roy doesn't help matters, leaning on a repetitive piano motif that hits the same three minor notes every time someone opens a door, until you start guessing the exact frame the ghost is going to leap out from behind the curtain. It's a small thing, sure, but that same four-note cue plays at least twenty times before the intermission, and by the tenth repetition, it stops sounding spooky and starts sounding like an ice cream truck that's lost its mind.

Bollywood movies have long had a complicated relationship with the supernatural, usually preferring to retreat into safe zones of reincarnation and temple bells rather than staring into the cold, empty abyss of actual body horror, and Pari tries very hard to split the difference without getting its nice clothes dirty. It wants to be a feminist fable about the abuse of the vulnerable wrapped in genre packaging, but it keeps tripping over its own feet whenever it has to explain the mechanics of the ancient underground sect hunting our heroine through the suburbs of Bengal. The pacing is a disaster, lurching forward with furious violence for ten minutes before parking itself in a damp living room for twenty minutes of people staring into each other's eyes while rain beats a monotonous tattoo against the windowpanes. By the time we reach the final confrontation in a burning shed, the narrative has tied itself into such complicated knots that the resolution feels less like a earned climax and more like the director simply yelled cut because the crew had to catch their flights home. It's an interesting failure, full of ambition that outstrips its budget and ideas that outgrow its script, leaving behind a jagged collection of striking images that deserve a much better movie to live in.