That specific blue tint in the corners of the frame during the first ten minutes looks less like a deliberate artistic choice and more like someone forgot to turn off a color grading preset before exporting the master file. Vikram Bhatt’s screenplays have always relied on shadows that hide budget constraints, but Horror Story takes this reliance and stretches it so thin you can practically see the plywood sets underneath. If I'm honest, the whole thing starts with a group of privileged twenty-somethings gathering for a farewell party that feels less like a real human gathering and more like a commercial for an unreleased deodorant brand. They are the kind of people who talk exclusively in exposition while holding red plastic cups that never seem to lose their foam. Karan Kundra plays Neel, the sort of guy who wears leather jackets indoors and treats emotional vulnerability like a software bug that needs patching immediately. He leads this pack of bright-eyed casualties into the abandoned Grand Hotel, a rotting concrete skeleton that supposedly holds dark secrets from its past life as a luxury destination. The premise itself is borrowed directly from Session 9, minus the industrial atmosphere and the creeping psychological decay that made Brad Anderson's film actually linger in your brain for days after viewing.

Director Ayush Raina inherits a script by Vikram that insists on keeping its characters trapped inside the haunted enclosure by a series of increasingly contrived excuses involving lost car keys and locked gates. Once they are inside, the movie settles into a rhythm of loud noises and flickering lights that somehow fails to generate even a mild pulse. The camerawork bounces around with a handheld franticness that suggests the cinematographer had a sudden caffeine overdose right before calling action. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how every time someone opens a heavy wooden door, the sound effect editors throw in a screech that sounds like a rusted gate from a completely different movie. Nishant Malkani and Ravish Desai wander through these dim corridors with expressions of mild concern, looking less like terrorized youths fighting for survival and more like actors trying to remember where they parked their trailers. Hasan Zaidi attempts to ground the chaos with some earnest line delivery, but he is constantly undermined by dialogue that treats grammar as a loose suggestion. Aparna Bajpai, Radhika Menon, Nandini Vaid, and Sheetal Singh round out the ensemble, each getting their designated turn to stare into an empty corner, scream at a shadow, and then vanish into a conveniently timed blackout.

What keeps this from being entirely forgettable is the sheer, unadulterated earnestness with which the production commits to its bargain-basement supernatural lore. Hindi films have a long and storied tradition of haunted property horror, dating back to classics that utilized practical fog machines and vibrating walls with far more style than digital trickery can ever muster here. The CGI ghosts that finally materialize in the third act look like unfinished textures from a video game that was rushed out for the holiday shopping season. They appear, they screech, they flick a ceiling fan, and then they retreat back into the shadows to wait for the next victim to stumble over a floorboard. The sound design leans so heavily on sudden bass drops that my chair actually rattled during a scene where nothing was happening except a character walking slowly down a hallway. There are no quiet moments of dread, no slow-burning tension that lets the environment breathe, just a relentless barrage of sonic jump scares designed to wake up anyone who nodded off during the endless hallway tracking shots. Ravish Desai's character gets trapped in a bathroom with a flickering fluorescent bulb, and the sequence goes on for so long you start wondering if the crew just took a lunch break while the camera kept rolling.

Among recent Bollywood releases, this particular entry stands out mostly for its absolute refusal to try anything resembling subversion. It operates like a checklist of haunted house clichés dutifully translated into Hindi dialogue without any local flavor or cultural specificity. The hotel could be anywhere, the kids could be from any city, and the ghosts operate by the exact same rules laid down by a hundred American straight-to-video ghost stories from the early two-thousands. Yet there is a strange sort of comfort in watching a movie that makes so few demands on your intellectual faculties. You never have to guess who is going to be picked off next, because the narrative structure follows a strict arithmetic of expendability based entirely on billing order. The lighting remains stubbornly one-note, casting an ugly digital sheen over faces that should be sweating with panic instead of looking like they just finished a touch-up in the makeup trailer. It is the kind of cinematic experience that exists purely to fill a midnight television slot on a Tuesday when you are too tired to reach for the remote control. The dialogue bounces between awkward English slang and stilted Hindi exposition with a clumsiness that almost feels charming if you stare at it long enough.

As the runtime crawls toward its inevitable conclusion, the plot attempts a couple of meager twists that anyone who has ever seen a television commercial will spot coming from a mile away. Characters split up because it is narratively convenient for them to be murdered in isolation, ignoring every basic instinct of human self-preservation. When the final confrontation with the primary spirit takes place, it involves a lot of running in circles and shouting each other's names over a sound mix that drowns out half the dialogue. The editing gets choppy here, cutting between frantic close-ups of wide eyes and blurry wide shots of concrete pillars that fail to establish any clear spatial geography. It simply stops when it runs out of money and victims, leaving the survivors standing in the grey morning light looking slightly annoyed that their night out didn't go according to plan. There is no grand moral, no lingering haunting image, and no real sense that any of these people learned anything from their ordeal except maybe to check the lock on the front gate before stepping inside a cursed building.