Sharman Joshi pronounces the word black magic with an emphasis on the first syllable that makes you wonder if he is trying to spit out a cherry pit while standing on stage at a community theatre in Basingstoke. It is a small thing, but it bugged me the entire hour and fifty minutes, recurring whenever the plot needs a reminder that the supernatural forces at play are dark and serious.

Vikram Bhatt’s production machinery has cranked out third-tier horror items for decades now, usually trading on sepia tones and church bells that ring without wind, though Tinu Suresh Desai takes the directing credit here. He inherits a script that treats the British capital as a gloomy collection of rainy alleys and dusty drawing rooms where wealthy Indians live with too many chandeliers. It looks less like a city and more like a set left over from a forgotten television miniseries about Jack the Ripper, shot through a lens smeared with Vaseline to evoke old memories. The screenplay relies heavily on characters staring intently at candles while wind howls indoors through closed windows, creating a geography where physics simply takes a smoke break whenever a ghost needs to slam a door.

Meera Chopra spends a solid portion of the runtime pinned to a bed, growling in a voice that has been digitally lowered by four semitones to suggest demonic possession, which worked better when Bipasha Basu did it in Raaz a dozen years ago. She has very little to do besides writhe in white cotton nightgowns and throw porcelain teacups across the room with surprising accuracy. Diganth plays the hapless husband who wanders around looking like he just received a bad credit card bill, utterly incapable of projecting the panic required when his wife starts speaking fluent Aramaic at the breakfast table. Sharman Joshi arrives later as the ex-lover turned exorcist, wearing a trench coat that must have weighed ten pounds and carrying a wooden box full of rusty iron nails that clatter about whenever he kneels to pray.

The cinematography leans on blue filters so heavy you could mistake Rajasthan for the North Pole, and the editing cuts away from reaction shots half a second too late, leaving the actors blinking at nothing in particular. Then there is the background score, a relentless loop of violin screeches that hit the exact same chord whenever a shadow moves across the wallpaper, robbing the jump scares of any actual surprise. It is the kind of sound design where you can practically see the audio engineer falling asleep at the mixing desk while nudging the volume slider up on every thunderclap.

Hindi horror movies have long struggled with the problem of taking themselves too seriously while recycling plots from late-night American cable broadcasts, and this one commits fully to that tradition without a wink of irony. The thematic undercurrent deals with infidelity, guilt, and the supernatural penalty for abandoning your religious roots, though these ideas are dropped the second a possessed maid starts crawling up the wardrobe. Nobody involved seems interested in exploring the emotional fallout between the estranged lovers who are forced to share a haunted roof; they are merely waiting for the next cue to spray green slime on the upholstery.

There is a specific supporting actor playing a local priest who is so obviously dubbed by someone standing three feet away from a cheap microphone in a Mumbai studio that every single one of his line readings sounds like it was recorded inside a metal bucket. It pulls you right out of the nineteenth-century London illusion every single time he opens his mouth to warn about Satan. Bollywood has produced some genuinely terrifying genre pieces when it stops worrying about international aesthetics, but this particular entry feels assembled by committee out of spare parts from a dusty warehouse.

You find yourself checking your watch during the climax because the exorcism involves roughly twenty minutes of screaming matches in front of a fireplace while the furniture shifts six inches to the left. Sharman Joshi holds up a crucifix that looks like it was bought at a gift shop in Leicester Square, shouting Latin phrases that probably translate to grocery lists. The resolution arrives with the abruptness of a power outage, leaving the survivors standing in a courtyard that looks suspiciously like a studio backlot in Film City, waiting for someone to yell cut so they can go home and eat dinner.