That specific blue tint in the color grading, the one that makes every Romanian cold-war drama look like someone dropped the hard drive in a puddle, has somehow migrated to the mountains of Romania where Vikram Bhatt decided to shoot another installment of his favorite franchise, which is annoying because you can barely see the actors’ faces half the time. It is a small thing, but it bugged me from the very first frame where a violin shrieks while a car drives through fog that looks less like atmospheric mist and more like a high school theatrical production running out of dry ice. You are supposed to be terrified by the impending doom of a married couple relocating for a fresh start, but instead you are just wondering if anyone on the crew brought a decent flashlight. Bollywood has spent the better part of two decades trying to figure out how to make a jump scare land without relying on a brass section doing a sudden sonic punch to your eardrums, yet Raaz - Reboot arrives and immediately hits that exact same tired panic button like it's 2002 all over again.

Vikram Bhatt directs with the sort of muscle memory you only get from shooting thirty horror films on microscopic budgets in three-week schedules, which means the camera is constantly circling actors who are trying very hard to look distressed while holding a cup of lukewarm tea. He has this tic where he pushes in on a character's eye during moments of psychological stress, a trick borrowed straight from 1990s direct-to-video thrillers that lost their novelty roughly ten minutes after Sam Raimi stopped doing it. The screenplay feels less like a constructed narrative and more like a collection of spooky tropes that someone found in a bin and glued together with dialogue that sounds like it was translated from English by someone who learned the language from old paperback novels. Gaurav Arora plays the brooding, insecure husband with a jawline that works overtime to convey jealousy, though his character makes choices so bafflingly stupid you spend half the runtime hoping the ghost just finishes him off so everyone can go home. He wanders around empty corridors at night without turning on a single light switch, because in hindi movies basic domestic common sense is always the first casualty of supernatural activity.

Enter Kriti Kharbanda, who is saddled with the thankless task of being possessed, unpossessed, deeply worried, and emotionally gaslit, all while wearing wool coats that cost more than my first second-hand hatchback. She has a genuine screen presence that keeps the picture from completely sliding off the rails during the middle stretch where the plot stalls out entirely and becomes a repetitive loop of slamming doors and whispering voices. When she tries to sell the sheer terror of hearing things in the walls, you almost believe you are watching a real movie instead of a haunted house demo reel, which is more than can be said for the generic sound design that surrounds her with groaning floorboards that sound suspiciously like someone rubbing a wet finger over a wine glass. She handles the physical contortions of the possession scenes with a certain athletic grace that recalls how expertly Bipasha Basu navigated the exact same emotional beats in the original 2002 film, though without quite matching that older picture's ability to make a sterile hotel room feel genuinely suffocating.

Then Emraan Hashmi shows up in a trench coat, looking like a man who wandered onto the wrong set while trying to find a place to smoke a cigarette, which actually works to his advantage since his character is supposed to be an enigmatic ex-lover with a grudge. He plays the brooding artist turned mysterious savior with that trademark half-smile he has been cashing in on since Murder, and if you have seen three of his previous projects you already know the exact cadence of every single line delivery. He brings a comforting, weathered familiarity to the proceedings that borders on cozy, like putting on a battered old jacket that smells faintly of clove cigarettes and cheap cologne. The supporting cast, meanwhile, feels largely populated by local Romanian actors who were clearly dubbed by people sitting in a studio in Andheri with a microphone duct-taped to a desk, resulting in line readings that float a fraction of a second away from the actors' lips.

The soundtrack relies heavily on that one piano melody that every romantic thriller from the mid-2000s seems to share in its DNA, playing softly during flashbacks that are meant to establish a passionate history between characters who have the chemistry of two damp cardboard boxes. Jeet Gannguli and Sanaa Bhardwaj churn out ballads that would probably sound fine on a radio station late at night when you are driving alone on an empty highway, but dropped into the middle of a scene where a woman is vomiting black sludge they feel completely detached from the physical reality on screen. It is an interesting curio of modern commercial hindi cinema how the songs are expected to carry the emotional weight that the dialogue refuses to earn, functioning as mandatory emotional pit stops before the narrative rushes back to the next poorly lit hallway. You get the distinct impression that the producers cared far more about getting a million views on YouTube for the music video than whether the actual ghost logic made a lick of sense.

By the time the third act rolls around and the exposition starts flying fast and loose to explain why everyone is being haunted by a spirit with a specific grievance involving old photographs and betrayal, the movie has already exhausted its meager supply of genuine dread. There is a bizarre flashback involving black magic rituals that looks like it was lit with a single desk lamp and shot on a camera that was desperately needing a sensor clean, and if I'm honest, that messy lack of polish is almost charming in a way that slicker, more expensive Hollywood studio horror rarely manages to be. You can see the seams everywhere, from the obvious body doubles used during the more violent thrashing scenes to the boom mic dipping into the top of the frame during a tense conversation in a kitchen. It is an untidy, lumbering object that doesn't quite work as a scare-fest and doesn't have the psychological depth to function as a proper marital drama either.

Emraan Hashmi spends the climax staring intensely into space while reciting dialogue about eternal love and the power of forgiveness, his voice dropping into that familiar gravelly register that has launched a thousand internet memes, while Kriti Kharbanda writhes around on a stone floor looking appropriately damp. There is no grand artistic revelation hiding in the closing moments, no clever twist that forces you to rethink everything you just watched, just a loud chord and a fade to black that feels less like an ending and more like the projectionist simply getting tired and hitting the power switch. It sits squarely in that vast, forgettable middle tier of genre output where nobody involved disgraced themselves, yet nobody did anything that will warrant discussion a week from now. The projector lamp flickered twice during the screening I attended, which honestly provided more atmosphere than anything the cinematographer managed to capture in those endless, dreary snowscapes.