That sound design choice in the opening twenty minutes where the breathing on the audio track is just a fraction too loud really set my teeth on edge, and not in the spooky way the sound mixer intended. It is a small thing, sure, but when a horror picture tries to manufacture dread out of nothing more than empty rooms and heavy sighs, getting the baseline acoustics wrong makes the whole thing feel like an amateur hour ghost train. Jay K’s feature debut with Ezra is certainly more ambitious than your average regional chill-fest, bringing an actual budget and a serious tonal palette to the proceedings, but it suffers from that persistent Malayalam cinema habit of over-explaining the supernatural until the ghosts feel less like spirits and more like municipal utility workers. We are dumped immediately into the antique trade of Mattancherry, a location that has served as the gritty, sun-bleached backdrop for half the crime dramas on the market, though here it is drenched in rain and grease to sell the spooky antique angle. The box itself—the Abrahamic dybbuk box that drives the plot—looks convincing enough, carved with enough Hebrew script to keep the prop department sweating through their shifts, even if the ancient curses inside it tend to behave with the administrative efficiency of a heavily unionized postal service.

Prithviraj Sukumaran carries the picture with that specific brand of weary, slightly irritable intelligence that makes him completely watchable even when the script asks him to stare blankly at floating objects and nod. He plays Abraham Ezra, a man whose life is already falling apart around his ears before the haunted Jewish box arrives on his doorstep, though the film is weirdly uninterested in his interior life outside of his duty as a husband and an antiquities expert who looks great in a well-tailored turtleneck. His chemistry with Priya Anand feels functional rather than electric, the two of them rattling around a massive, gorgeous house that looks like it costs three times what an export-import consultant actually makes, delivering lines with the weary cadence of people who have been on set for fourteen hours straight and just want to hit the buffet table. It reminds me a bit of Emraan Hashmi's exhausted middle-distance stare in Raaz Reboot, that same glazed look actors get when they realize the dialogue is mostly just shouting exposition across empty corridors while the wind machine blows dust directly into their contact lenses. Meanwhile, Tovino Thomas pops up later in the third act as a bearded priest who knows more than he is letting on, sporting a denim jacket and a cross that looks like it came from a mall kiosk in Kochi, adding a layer of rugged skepticism that briefly threatens to rescue the picture from its own self-importance. The supporting cast is generally fine, though there is one unfortunate police inspector whose dubbing is so out of sync with his jaw movements that every interrogation scene plays like a badly translated kung-fu movie from the seventies.

The script gets tangled up in its own historical footnotes once the flashbacks kick in, dragging us back to twentieth-century Cochin to explain the origin of the dybbuk and the tragic romance that got the spirit trapped in the wood in the first place. This is where the movie genuinely slows down to a crawl, trading its atmospheric dread for a history lesson that feels less like a dark fable and more like a wikipedia article read aloud by someone with a cold. The period details are lushly rendered by the art department, who clearly spent their entire budget on vintage radios and Hebrew prayer shawls, but the dialogue in these historical segments sounds stiff and rehearsed, as if the actors were reading subtitles that hadn't quite been localized for human speech. Horror needs momentum to work, and every time the film stops to unpack another paragraph of religious lore or tragic back-story, the tension leaks out of the room like air from a punctured tire. It is a pacing trap that catches a lot of modern genre filmmakers who think that adding layers of historical tragedy automatically makes their ghost stories deeper, forgetting that an audience will trade twenty minutes of exposition for a single, well-executed jump scare that actually lands.

Sujith Vassudev’s cinematography is the best thing the movie has going for it, leaning heavily into deep blues and sickly greens that make Kochi look like a rain-slicked Gotham designed by someone who really loves antique furniture. The camera movements are smooth and deliberate, floating down corridors with a mechanical grace that suggests a very expensive rig operated by someone who knows precisely how to frame a corner so that you are looking for the monster even when nothing is there. Yet this visual polish sometimes works against the horror, making everything look a bit too clean and designed, like a high-end furniture catalog where someone occasionally throws a bucket of fake blood against the wallpaper. Sushin Shyam’s background score works overtime to bridge these gaps, sliding from ambient drones into heavy orchestral stabs that tell you precisely when to be frightened, though it leans so heavily on the string section that by the hour mark you can practically hear the bow hairs snapping.

There is an underlying anxiety in the text about cultural displacement and the persistence of ancient minorities in contemporary spaces, touching lightly on the Jewish diaspora in Kerala without ever really knowing what to do with those themes beyond using them as spooky window dressing. Bollywood movies and other mainstream hindi films have occasionally flirted with the supernatural through this kind of imported demonology, but they usually sand down the edges until the monster is just a generic CG face screaming in a dark mirror. Ezra tries for something more culturally specific, anchoring its haunting in a real community with its own customs and burial grounds, even if it eventually abandons that specificity for a big CGI showdown that looks like every other exorcism sequence shot in the last twenty years. The demon itself, when it finally stops hiding behind slamming doors and flickering lightbulbs, is a standard digital creation that loses all the creepy claustrophobia of the early scenes by simply walking around and tossing people against the ceiling.

By the time the closing credits roll, the film has exhausted most of its narrative goodwill through sheer repetition, trotting out the same possession tropes and historical revelations that every viewer worth their salt guessed twenty minutes into the first act. It isn't a disaster by any stretch of the imagination, and it easily outclasses the sort of bargain-basement chillers that routinely pollute the multiplex during the monsoon season simply by virtue of having professional lighting and a lead actor who refuses to phone it in. But it is also desperately overlong, stretching a forty-minute ghost story across two and a half hours of brooding silences, antique logistics, and theological debates that belong in a seminary classroom rather than a Friday night creature feature.

Prithviraj does what he can with a role that requires him to look increasingly concerned about his wife's escalating collection of antique Judaica, and the production design deserves a nod for making a wooden box look genuinely threatening. If the editing had been a little more ruthless and someone had taken a red pen to the entire middle section involving the historical flashbacks, this might have been a lean, mean genre exercise rather than a bloated prestige ghost story that takes itself far too seriously to actually scare anybody.