The sound design in the opening ten minutes of Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3 is mixed so aggressively loud that my popcorn bucket actually vibrated against the armrest, which if I am honest, was the most tactile thing about the entire first reel. Anees Bazmee wants us inside a haunted mansion immediately, but he also wants us to hear every single digital footstep, every manufactured creak of floorboards, and every single time Kartik Aaryan adjusts his sherwani like he is posing for a high-end designer's Instagram grid instead of fleeing from a supernatural entity.

Rajpal Yadav is still doing the exact same physical comedy he was doing two decades ago, running sideways, screaming in that high-pitched register that used to feel fresh during the early days of Bollywood comedies, though now it mostly feels like an endurance test for both his vocal cords and our patience. He plays Chhota Pandit with an energy that borders on manic exhaustion, sweating profusely under heavy lighting while delivering punchlines about ghosts and black magic that have the comedic rhythm of a wet noodle. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how his hair continuity changes in three consecutive shots during the hallway chase sequence, swinging from slicked back to completely disheveled without a single narrative justification for the physical transformation.

Enter Rooh Baba, the fraudulent exorcist played with a smirk so permanent it threatens to detach from Kartik Aaryan's face before the interval hits. Aaryan is working overtime to maintain the swagger left behind by Akshay Kumar in the original 2007 Priyadarshan film, yet his charm relies far too much on winking directly at the audience whenever a joke lands or, more frequently, when it completely thuds against the floor. He has a very specific cadence when delivering exposition, rushing through the Hindi lines as if he has a train to catch at Mumbai Central, never pausing to let a reaction sink in or to let a moment breathe on its own terms. He dances with precise, gym-honed athleticism, hitting every pop and lock with the mechanical perfection of a backup dancer who forgot to feel the music, which strips his musical numbers of any actual soul.

Then Vidya Balan and Madhuri Dixit arrive on screen, and the movie briefly remembers it has actual cinematic royalty in its cast, though Bazmee treats their presence less like a masterclass in screen acting and more like a competitive wrestling match for camera close-ups. Balan is returning to the franchise that made her dual-personality performance iconic, and she brings a weathered intensity to her scenes that suggests she is working from a much better, much darker script that must have existed in a parallel dimension before someone replaced all the dialogue with flat exposition. When she locks eyes with Dixit during a heavily choreographed dance-off, the frame crackles with an electricity that the rest of the movie simply cannot sustain for more than a few seconds at a time.

Madhuri Dixit matches her stride for stride, gliding through the corridors of the sprawling palace with an effortless grace that makes everyone else look like they are running on a treadmill. Their dual act in the second half saves the film from becoming a complete slog, grounding the otherwise chaotic supernatural nonsense in genuine dramatic weight, even if the screenplay insists on explaining every single plot twist three times just in case someone in the back row was checking their phone. The cinematography by Manu Anand relies too heavily on teal and orange color grading, plunging the mansion into such deep shadows that you can barely see the actors' facial expressions during the dialogue scenes, which feels like an obvious shortcut to disguise cheap set design.

Hindi cinema has always loved a good ghost story wrapped in a family comedy, but this franchise has completely abandoned the psychological ambiguity that made the original adaptation of Manichitrathazhu work so brilliantly. Instead of letting us wonder if the haunting is real or imagined, the script drops all pretense of subtlety and hands us CGI spirits that look like rejected assets from a mid-budget video game released in 2012. The editing by Manish More doesn't help matters, cutting away from reaction shots a beat too early, robbing the dramatic reveals of their intended impact because we are never allowed to sit with the horror or the humor for long enough to care about the outcome.

The soundtrack is stuffed with remixes of older hits, leaning on nostalgic crutches because the original composition team couldn't come up with a single memorable hook for the new sequences. Every time a romance scene starts to drag, a loud, over-produced club track kicks in, forcing the actors to pivot instantly from dramatic confrontation to synchronized pelvic thrusts against a fake marble pillar. It is exhausting to watch, not because it is offensive, but because it is so aggressively mediocre that it refuses to take any creative risks whatsoever, choosing instead to recycle every single trope from past hindi movies until the formula is worn completely threadbare.

There is a sequence near the climax where all the characters are trapped in a circular room shouting over each other, and the sound mixing gets so muddy you can barely distinguish Vidya Balan's dialogue from the background orchestral swells, which feels like a fitting metaphor for the movie as a whole. It wants to be a grand spectacle, a spooky comedy, a dance extravaganza, and a feminist revenge drama all at the same time, but it lacks the structural discipline to pull off any of those ambitions with genuine conviction. When the credits finally roll, you are left with the distinct impression of having spent two and a half hours inside a very loud washing machine that forgot to use any soap.