The sound design in Raaz 3 insists on using a very specific creaking door effect that plays at least four times in the first twenty minutes, and if I am honest, it drove me up the wall by the time the actual plot finally decided to show up. Vikram Bhatt has never been accused of hiding his influences, but this third iteration of a profitable franchise leans so heavily into the visual language of his previous horror outings that you half expect Bipasha Basu to start quoting lines from Jism. We are firmly inside the industrial machinery of commercial Hindi movies, where subtlety is treated like a manufacturing defect. The camera rarely stays still for more than two seconds, panning across dark hallways and zooming into wide, terrified eyes with the frantic energy of someone trying to win a bet about how many edits can fit into a single musical cue. It is loud. It is sweaty. It makes very little sense if you stop to think about the geography of the haunted mansion, but stopping to think is strictly prohibited.

Bipasha Basu anchors the first half with a performance that requires her to scream, cry, glare, and occasionally writhe on a bed while CGI insects crawl over her skin, which she does with an exhausting level of commitment. She plays a fading superstar whose career has hit a wall, so she turns to black magic to destroy her younger rival played by Esha Gupta, and the movie commits to this ridiculous premise with a straight face that is almost admirable. Basu tears into the screen time with a sort of frantic desperation that actually works for the character, though the dialogue she is given sounds like it was scraped off the back of a shampoo bottle. Esha Gupta, on the other hand, spends most of her scenes looking mildly confused by the lighting, delivering her lines with the casual stiffness of someone reading a bus schedule out loud. Emraan Hashmi wanders in as a cynical director who gets caught between the two women, playing the sort of greasy yet charismatic figure he has perfected across a dozen other thrillers. He does his usual routine of looking brooding while wearing a leather jacket and smoking indoors, leaning against doorframes with practiced ease.

The screenplay by Shagufta Rafique seems to have been written on a flight from Mumbai to London, lurching from one excessive set piece to another without bothering to connect the narrative dots. Characters change their motivations on a dime just because the script needs to get to the next jump scare involving a CGI ghost or a possessed pigeon. There is an entire sequence where Hashmi's character has to perform a ritual inside a disused railway yard that goes on for ten agonizing minutes, complete with chanting monks and green screen smoke that looks like it was rendered on an early nineties personal computer. It lacks the creeping dread that made the original 2002 film actually unsettling, opting instead for a relentless barrage of cheap shocks that grow numbing long before the intermission. Bollywood has long struggled to find a consistent tone for supernatural thrillers, usually defaulting to melodramatic flashbacks and ear-splitting orchestral stabs whenever the ghosts appear on screen, and this project follows that tired template to the letter.

Cinematographer Pravin Bhatt drenches every frame in blue and amber filters until you feel like you are watching the film through a pair of cheap sunglasses, and the editing by Kuldeep Mehan cuts away from every punchline and every scare a beat too soon. We never get to settle into a space because the camera is constantly hunting for a new angle, spinning around the actors as if stationary photography is illegal. The soundtrack, composed by Jeet Ganguly and Rashid Ali, features ballads that sound suspiciously similar to every other hit song produced by Mahesh Bhatt's camp during that decade, complete with passionate vocals and weeping acoustic guitars. These songs arrive with the predictability of a morning train, halting the momentum of the narrative just as things are starting to get slightly interesting, though Jacqueline Fernandez does make a brief, completely baffling appearance in one of the music videos that has nothing to do with the actual plot of the movie.

There is a recurring obsession with bodily fluids, boils, and crawling pests that suggests the filmmakers watched a few too many direct-to-video Hollywood horror flicks from the nineties and decided that gross-out imagery was an adequate substitute for atmosphere. Basu's descent into madness is charted through a series of increasingly absurd close-ups of her face covered in dirt and fake blood, while the supporting cast members overact with a theatrical fervor that belongs on a regional stage rather than a wide-release feature. Mohan Kapoor shows up for roughly three scenes as a shady occult expert who dispenses exposition with the enthusiasm of a man reading a dental bill. Yusuf Hussain plays a concerned producer in a single scene that feels like it was shot in a broom closet. These fleeting appearances do little to anchor a story that drifts untethered between psychological drama and campy monster feature.

The core conceit attempts to skewer the ruthless nature of the entertainment industry, suggesting that fame requires a Faustian bargain, but the social commentary is too blunt to leave a mark. Every time the script tries to say something about the disposable nature of stardom, a CGI spirit drops from the ceiling and ruins the moment with a loud screech. It is an exhausting watch, less because it is genuinely frightening and more because it refuses to let up for even a single minute, hammering away at your eardrums with sound design that treats every minor movement as an earthquake. By the time the credits roll over a reprise of the main romantic theme, you are left wondering how a cast of game performers and a crew with decent technical resources managed to produce something so persistently weightless.