Varun Sharma is sweating through a mustard-yellow shirt that looks like it belongs to a mechanic from 1994, and if I am honest, that visual detail stayed with me longer than any plot point about witches stealing brides in the dark woods. There is a specific kind of low-budget hustle written all over his face in the opening minutes of Roohi, a frantic desperation that almost tricks you into thinking you are watching something spontaneous before the machinery of the horror-comedy genre grinds to a halt and remembers it has a premise to fulfill. It follows Stree in the spiritual lineup of Bollywood releases, which means it inherits a very specific set of tonal gymnastics that nobody quite knows how to execute twice without breaking a leg. Hard-working producers thought they could bottle lightning twice by plugging the exact same formula into a slightly different part of Uttar Pradesh, but lightning is famously fickle and rarely cooperative when summoned by committee.

Hard-boiled genre blending requires a delicate touch that director Hardik Mehta occasionally fumbles because he keeps leaning too heavily on the crutch of frantic background score changes. One second you are watching two kidnappers argue about logistics in a dusty alley, and the next you are trapped in a strobe-lit jump scare that feels lifted from a cheap YouTube compilation. The screenplay by Gautam Mehra and Mrighdeep Singh Lamba lurches forward in fits and starts, abandoning narrative logic whenever it needs a quick laugh or a sudden mood shift to wake up the drowsy audience in the back row. Scenes stretch out past their welcome, lingering on reaction shots of wide-eyed horror that fail to land because the punchline was telegraphed five minutes prior by an overzealous editor who clearly fell in love with a particular wipe transition. It is the sort of movie where characters explain their motivations directly to the camera through voiceover narration, which is never a great sign.

Rajkummar Rao tries his absolute best to rescue the material from its own internal contradictions, playing a henchman with a stammer and a heart of gold who falls instantly for the very girl he is supposed to abduct. His physical comedy is sharp as always, relying on nervous twitches and vocal inflections that suggest a man constantly trying to talk his way out of an ambush. Janhvi Kapoor walks a much stranger tightrope as the titular character, shifting between a docile small-town bride and a demonic entity with a guttural voice that sounds like a lawnmower choking on wet leaves. She has a haunting stillness in her eyes during the quiet moments, though the heavy-handed CGI forces her to do too much pantomime work against green screens that never quite match the lighting of the dusty practical locations. They share a peculiar chemistry that works best when the script simply lets them sit in a room together without making weird noises at each other.

Cinematographer Amalendu Chaudhary drenches the frame in neon blues and sickly greens whenever the supernatural element takes over, turning everyday forests into high-contrast music video sets that feel entirely divorced from reality. The soundtrack hits you over the head with remixed wedding anthems and brooding tracks that try to manufacture dread out of thin air, though one particular romantic ballad plays three times too many during montages that could easily have been trimmed by half. Hindi movies have a long history of leaning on musical cues to bail out scenes that lack dramatic tension, and this one relies on those crutches so heavily you can almost hear the gears turning behind the speakers. Sound design choices occasionally baffle, especially a recurring wet squelch effect that accompanies every single transformation sequence regardless of whether it makes physical sense.

Beneath the genre machinery and the prosthetic teeth, the film gestures toward a conversation about female agency and the horror of being forced into an arranged marriage against one's will. The demon inside Roohi represents all the rage and independence that polite society beats out of young women in rural corners of the country, transforming suppression into actual claws. Yet this thematic ambition keeps getting interrupted by broad slapstick and gross-out gags about bodily functions, creating a bizarre whiplash where you are asked to care about patriarchal oppression and then immediately giggled at because a man fell into a bush. It wants to bite the hand that feeds it while simultaneously licking the frosting off the cake, resulting in a toothless middle ground that satisfies nobody.

You leave the theater thinking mostly about that mustard-yellow shirt Varun Sharma wore, and how strange it is that movies costing millions of rupees can still look so profoundly empty once the lights come back up. There is a version of this story that honors the pulp horror roots of older hindi films without constantly winking at the audience to assure them everyone knows it is just a bit of fun. Instead, you get a lumpy middle-tier streaming filler stretched across a cinema screen, begging you to forgive its clumsy pacing because the lead actor did a funny dance during the credits.