That one screeching sound effect plays about four too many times during the opening twenty minutes of Mumbai 125 KM, and if I'm honest, it set my teeth on edge well before the actual plot bothered to introduce itself. Hemant Madhukar directs this 3D horror outing with a fondness for digital gloom that makes whole sequences look like they were rendered on a slightly outdated home computer circa 2008, swallowing up the actors in a soup of murky grey pixels whenever the car approaches a supposedly haunted stretch of road. It is a strange beast, this movie, stumbling through tropes borrowed wholesale from Hollywood ghost stories while remaining stubbornly rooted in the specific texture of midnight drives on desolate Indian expressways where streetlights give up miles before the destination.

The script operates on a logic where characters must constantly make the absolute worst possible decision just to keep the runtime ticking forward toward its predictable dawn. Karanvir Bohra leads the pack as a guy whose primary emotional register seems to be mildly inconvenienced concern, even when supernatural forces are actively rearranging the interior geography of his sedan. He shares screen time with Veena Malik, Vije Bhatia, Vedita Pratap Singh, Joey Debroy, and Aparnaa Bajpai, all of whom struggle against dialogue that sounds like it was translated from an instruction manual for an imported refrigerator before being punched up with some extra groaning. There is a supporting extra playing a toll booth attendant who is so aggressively dubbed by someone else entirely that his mouth movements and the audio track belong to entirely different dimensions of space and time. No one on set apparently thought to fix it during post-production, which is funny once you notice it but miserable when you are trying to buy into the spooky atmosphere of the expressway.

Madhukar tries to build tension through endless panning shots of empty asphalt and sudden close-ups of dashboard ornaments vibrating from phantom impacts, echoing the cheap thrills of something like Raaz 3 without any of that film's oily panache. The cinematography relies heavily on stereoscopic depth tricks that mostly just result in floating leaves and stray drops of digital rain hovering awkwardly in front of the actors' faces like gnats refusing to go away. Yet there are moments in the middle stretch where the sheer monotony of the driving scenes takes on a weird, almost hypnotic rhythm, lulling you into a state of drowsy indifference that feels oddly fitting for a midnight commute. The soundtrack leans hard on ambient drone and sudden orchestral stabs that telegraph every single jump scare about five seconds before it actually occurs, ruining whatever surprise the editing room might have salvaged from the raw footage.

Hindi movies have a long and storied tradition of throwing random supernatural elements into urban settings and seeing what sticks to the wall, but this particular entry feels less like a continuation of that lineage and more like an algorithmically generated checklist of genre cliches. The characters spend an unreasonable amount of time arguing about relationships that ended years ago while a malevolent entity presumably waits by the next mile marker, creating a jarring tonal mismatch that makes you wish the ghost would just show up and speed things along. It's a small thing, but the constant cigarette lighting without anyone ever actually taking a drag drove me crazy every time it popped up on screen. Bollywood movies sometimes capture a genuine nocturnal poetry on celluloid, but here the digital sensors just pick up mud and glare, turning what should have been a tense psychological trap into a blurry exercise in endurance.

When the third act finally rolls around with its dizzying array of cheap CGI specters and circular driving logic, the narrative collapses into an incoherent mess of flashbacks and ghostly hallucinations that explain almost nothing while demanding a lot of patience. Bohra and his costars do what they can with material that requires them to scream at empty air while looking terrified of a rearview mirror, but the digital effects work actively works against their performances at every turn. You are left staring at the credits wondering why nobody checked the audio sync on the toll booth guy or why the car never seemed to run out of petrol despite hours of phantom cruising. The whole enterprise drifts away from memory almost instantly, leaving behind nothing more substantial than that one annoying screeching sound effect echoing in an empty room.