Varun Thakur says a line early in this mess about the lighting being low that accidentally describes the whole aesthetic of Shaitaan Haveli better than any press kit ever could. It is a small thing, but it bugged me, mostly because the film tries so hard to evoke a very specific era of forgotten straight-to-video garbage without ever understanding the desperate, sweating sincerity that made those cheap B-grade Hindi movies watchable in the first place. You can recreate the fuzz of a VHS tape all you want in post-production, but you cannot easily fake the absolute lack of self-awareness that defined the original wave of Ramsay Brothers knockoffs. This movie knows it is a spoof. That is its fatal flaw. The actors know they are being funny, the director thinks he is winking at the audience, and the result is a smug little exercise that plays like a sketch that refuses to end. We are trapped in a loop of genre references where nobody seems invested in the actual mechanics of terror, relying instead on an endless parade of rubber bats and badly painted skulls to fill the running time. If I am honest, I found myself checking my watch forty minutes in, wondering if the budget just ran out or if the filmmakers genuinely believed that repeating the same spooky sound effect four times in a row constituted a punchline.

The direction by Hemant Gaba is less a guiding hand and more an extended shoulder shrug, pointing the cameras at dusty corridors and letting the actors wander around until someone yells cut. The screenplay tries to be clever by meta-commenting on its own production difficulties, dropping characters into a haunted ruin where a cheesy horror movie is apparently being shot, which creates a dizzying layer of artificiality that sucks the air right out of the room. When a film spends half its runtime reminding you that you are watching actors pretend to be crew members making a bad movie, it relinquishes any right to scare you. You end up watching people negotiate the logistics of fake blood instead of feeling any actual dread. Bhupesh Singh tries to anchor some of this chaos with a manic, wide-eyed energy that occasionally works in short bursts, but he is stranded in scenes that go on for three beats too long. There is a protracted sequence involving a wooden chest that could have been chopped down to ten seconds without losing a single plot point, yet it lingers, dragging every character through the same repetitive beats of confusion and false alarms. The editing choices throughout this stretch feel less like artistic decisions and more like the result of an editor who simply fell asleep at the timeline.

Performances range from aggressively broad to vaguely embarrassed, with Varun Thakur walking through the ruins like a man who signed a three-day contract and regrets every single clause of it. He delivers his lines with the flat, defensive detachment of a stand-up comedian performing in an empty room, refusing to commit to the bit because he seems to know the material is beneath him. Hemant Kumar fares slightly better simply by leaning into the absurdity with a straight face, though his character is given so little to do other than look startled by falling props that he barely registers as a living presence. It is hard to care about who survives the night when the people on screen look like they are waiting for their Uber eats order to arrive outside the gates of the haunted bungalow. We have seen this dynamic done with actual bite before, and if you watch something like Johnny Gaddaar, you realize how much tension relies on actors who actually believe in the sleazy gravity of the world they are inhabiting, whereas here everyone is constantly breaking character with their body language.

Visually, the film leans hard into a muddy, desaturated palette that makes every frame look like it was scrubbed through a dirty dish sponge, which is a choice that gets exhausting after the first twenty minutes. The shadows do not hide anything interesting; they just obscure the budget constraints with a heavy coat of digital digital grime that lacks the tactile warmth of actual film stock or even worn magnetic tape. The sound design is particularly grating, relying on a loop of thunder crashes and distorted organ stabs that seem to trigger randomly regardless of what is happening on screen. I lost count of how many times the exact same cat screech was used to punctuate a non-event in the hallway. It is a lazy shorthand that substitutes noise for atmosphere, punishing the viewer with sound levels that spike violently every time a door creaks open. Mainstream hindi cinema has sometimes struggled with how to handle horror without defaulting to cheap jump scares, but Shaitaan Haveli doubles down on the worst habits of the genre while pretending it is doing something ironic.

The themes here are messy at best, tangling themselves up in a knot of pop culture nostalgia that assumes you will forgive a lack of narrative structure simply because you recognize a reference to an old cassette tape or a polyester safari suit. There is an underlying cynicism to the whole enterprise, treating the audience like saps who will clap for anything vintage regardless of whether it actually functions as a story. We are meant to chuckle at the tropes of older hindi movies, but mockery is not the same thing as affection, and the film lacks the genuine warmth that makes pastiche tolerable. When a project devotes all its energy to mocking the clumsy charm of past low-budget cinema, it usually ends up feeling a lot more soulless and a lot more tedious than the very things it is poking fun at. By the time the climax stumbles onto the screen with a completely unearned CGI ghost that looks like a rejected screensaver, you are not annoyed or terrified, just profoundly ready for the credits to roll so you can go watch something with a pulse.