There is a specific sound an Akshay Kumar dialogue makes when it hits the back of a hollow digital soundstage that tells you precisely how many days the star spent on the floor, and in Laxmii, that sound is practically a percussion instrument. If I'm honest, nobody goes into a horror-comedy remake expecting a masterclass in spatial acoustics, but Raghava Lawrence directing his own original Tamil hit Kanchana into the Hindi belt feels less like an adaptation and more like a loud uncle shouting the same joke twice because nobody laughed the first time. The plot lumbers along with the grace of a refrigerated truck taking a sharp left turn, dragging Asif and Priya into an ancestral home where things go bump in the night with the subtlety of a falling anvil. You get the standard trope of the rational skeptic forced to eat his own words, though Kumar plays the skepticism with such casual exhaustion that you half-expect him to check his wristwatch for tee-time while a ghost is shaking a heavy iron chain three feet away from his left ear. It’s a messy sprawl of broad gags about ghost phobias crashing headfirst into melodrama about societal marginalization, and the tonal gear-grinding starts about fifteen minutes in and never really lets up.

Lawrence directs like someone who has never been told the word cut, leaving reaction shots hanging in the middle of a scene for two beats too long until the actors look genuinely confused about where they are supposed to be looking. The screenplay lurches between slapstick involving a ghost-possessed husband and genuinely dark flashbacks of trauma without ever building a bridge between the two moods, leaving the audience to endure whiplash that feels completely unearned. Kiara Advani does what she can with a wife character whose primary function in hindi movies of this specific budget tier is to look concerned in pastel sarees while her husband makes terrible puns about spirits, and she manages to bring a sliver of actual human warmth to a couple of scenes that desperately need it. The cinematography by Vetri is all over the map, leaning heavily on neon-blue moonlight and digital smoke machines that make every single exterior shot look like a cheap music video from twenty-odd years ago, which is fine until you realize the film takes itself far too seriously during the exorcism sequences.

Then Sharad Kelkar enters the frame and single-handedly rescues the entire enterprise from drowning in its own screechy CGI. Playing the titular transgender ghost who takes over Kumar’s body, Kelkar brings a bruised, magnificent dignity to a role that could have easily devolved into cheap caricature, carrying the dramatic weight of the narrative with a physical stillness that contrasts sharply with the frantic, shouting energy everyone else brings to the table. His eyes hold a lifetime of accumulated rage and sorrow, making you wish the entire two hours had simply focused on his backstory instead of wasting screen time on cartoonish relatives hiding under bedsheets. It’s a performance that deserves to be in a much better movie, one that doesn't feel the need to undercut every moment of emotional truth with a fart joke or a weirdly timed reaction shot from a supporting actor who is clearly dubbed by someone in a Mumbai basement using a cheap USB microphone.

The soundtrack is a collection of loud, forgettable club tracks and emotional ballads that hit the cue cards with terrifying predictability, though the placement of them feels random enough to induce a mild headache by the interval. Bollywood movies have a long and storied history of blending horror with broad farce, but whereas Bhool Bhulaiyaa managed to keep its internal logic reasonably intact while Priyadarshan spun plates in the background, Laxmii treats its supernatural mechanics like loose suggestions that can be ignored whenever the director needs to fit in a dance number or a lecture on tolerance. The messaging around the third gender is loud and unambiguous, which is admirable in theory, but it arrives wrapped in such clumsy, heavy-handed dialogue that the empathy feels manufactured rather than felt. The background score swells into a deafening roar every time a ghost appears, as if Lawrence is terrified the audience might miss the cue to be frightened, missing the basic cinematic grammar that dread requires silence just as much as noise.

There is a recurring visual motif involving red sarees and flying kitchen knives that gets recycled at least four times too many, and every single time it happens, the editing choices get progressively more frantic until you can't tell who is hitting whom. It’s a small thing that bugged me, but the sound design insists on adding a wet squelch to every minor movement, whether it’s a character turning their head or a door creaking open, and after ninety minutes of it, your nervous system feels rubbed completely raw. You can see the seams of the production in almost every frame, from the dodgy green-screen work during the climax to the way supporting actors stand around waiting for their cue to scream, and it all adds up to an experience that feels rushed out to catch a streaming window rather than crafted for a theatrical screen. There is an ambitious, genuinely radical heart buried somewhere beneath the screaming and the poorly rendered digital snakes, but it gets smothered beneath too many layers of calculated star-power and tonal chaos.