R Madhavan says the word "bhai" about four times too many in the first twenty minutes of Shaitaan, and it is a small thing, but it bugged me because a man that menacing shouldn't be leaning on conversational filler to establish his casual menace. He plays Vanraj, a drifter who drops uninvited into the middle of a family vacation at a secluded farmhouse, and he brings with him a cold, unblinking brand of intrusive cordiality that immediately curdles the air in every room he enters. Ajay Devgn plays Kabir, the father whose defenses are entirely professional rather than spiritual, a man used to managing municipal crises who suddenly finds himself locked in a high-stakes standoff with an entity that refuses to negotiate using normal human logic. Vikas Bahl directs with a bluntness that feels almost accidental, stripping away the usual glossy finish you expect from modern Hindi films where every frame looks like it was color-graded by committee. Instead, the camera hangs around too long in hallways, catching awkward angles of wood paneling and dust motes spinning in afternoon light that should feel idyllic but instead feels suffocatingly still. The screenplay, adapted from the Gujarati horror flick Vash, takes its sweet time getting to the supernatural mechanics, choosing to linger on the sheer social awkwardness of having a stranger refuse to leave your house even when you have explicitly asked him to get out.

There is a sequence about forty minutes in where Janki Bodiwala, reprising her role as the possessed daughter Janvi, simply stands by the kitchen island and stares at her mother with eyes that appear to have been drained of all historical memory. It is a terrifyingly blank performance that avoids the usual head-spinning gymnastics of the genre, opting instead for a deadpan obedience to Vanraj's whispered commands that makes her skin-crawlingly alien. Bodiwala carries the bulk of the picture's physical weight, executing brutal acts of self-harm and domestic sabotage with a terrifyingly neutral facial expression, her limbs moving with a marionette stiffness that must have required hours of excruciating physical control on set. Opposite her, Devgn does his patented slow burn, that familiar furrowed brow and low-register exasperation that we have seen in half a dozen other thrillers, but here it works because the script denies him any easy heroics or last-minute gunfights to save the day. He is helpless, and he plays that helplessness with a stiffness in his shoulders that suggests a man whose entire worldview is crumbling because a weird guy in a polo shirt managed to hack his daughter's brain using little more than black magic and a very calm speaking voice. Madhavan is the real anchor, though, grinning through yellowed teeth while he eats local snacks off their coffee table, treating the destruction of a nuclear family like an exceedingly dull afternoon errand he has to run before the shops close. If I'm honest, the domestic setup feels a bit standard-issue at first—the busy dad, the anxious mom played by Jyotika with a quiet desperation that keeps the melodrama from boiling over, the rebellious teenager—but once the possession takes hold, the movie drops all pretense of being a standard Bollywood family drama and turns into a claustrophobic chamber piece about parental consent and bodily autonomy.

The sound design deserves a special mention because it avoids the deafening orchestral stings that usually telegraph a jump scare five seconds before it happens, opting instead for low-frequency hums and sudden drops in ambient noise that make your ears ring in the dark theater. Amit Trivedi's score relies on scratchy string instruments and distorted vocal samples that sound like they were recorded on an old cassette tape found in a damp basement, giving the auditory landscape an unwashed texture that matches the rural Gujarat setting. Cinematographer Sudhakar Reddy shoots the interiors with a sickly yellow pallor that makes everyone look slightly jaundice-afflicted, contrasting sharply with the harsh, bleached-out sunlight of the exterior shots where the family tries and fails to find help from neighbors who are either too terrified to get involved or simply not there. The house itself becomes a character, a sprawling, modern-rustic box with too many glass doors and wide-open sightlines that offer zero privacy once the terror moves indoors, forcing the characters to cower in bathrooms and pantry corners that offer no real safety. It reminds me a bit of Michael Haneke's Funny Games in the way it weaponizes polite social convention against the protagonists, trapping them inside their own good manners while a smiling sociopath systematically dismantles their psychological stability piece by piece.

At its core, Shaitaan is less about demons with glowing eyes and more about the terrifying ease with which parental authority can be legally and physically hijacked by forces completely outside our control. The central conceit—that a parent must literally give permission for the dark entity to enter their child's mind—turns every spoken word into a potential trap, transforming mundane conversations into high-tension legalistic debates where a single casual agreement can cost you everything you love. It touches on the anxieties of raising teenagers in an era where outside influences feel increasingly predatory and impossible to monitor, turning the ancient trope of demonic possession into a rather brutal metaphor for losing your kid to an ideology or an addiction you never saw coming. Bahl doesn't push these themes with a heavy hand, thankfully, letting them sit uncomfortably in the background while the characters scream, bleed, and throw each other through glass coffee tables in a desperate attempt to regain control of their living room. Some might find the third act resolution a bit too neat, a sudden pivot toward emotional catharsis that feels slightly unearned after two hours of relentless psychological torture, but the film earns some goodwill by refusing to let its characters off the hook completely just because the credits are about to roll.

There are definitely pacing issues in the middle stretch where the narrative spins its wheels through repetitive dialogue scenes that don't reveal anything new about the antagonist's motivations, leaving the audience stranded in the living room while characters argue in circles about whether to call the police or a local priest. Yet even during those sluggish moments, the sheer commitment of the three lead actors keeps the picture from completely derailing into B-movie camp, grounding the ridiculous supernatural premise in genuine familial grief and exhaustion. Hindi movies have often struggled to find a middle ground between cheesy ghost stories and over-produced supernatural thrillers, but this one finds a greasy, unpleasant sweet spot that lingers in your head long after you have stumbled out of the theater and back into the parking lot. It is a nasty piece of work that doesn't care if you like its characters, doesn't care if you guess the ending, and certainly doesn't care about offering you a clean moral takeaway to help you sleep better at night.