Rajneesh Duggal spends a large portion of Saansein-The Last Breath wearing a polo neck sweater that looks remarkably itchy under studio lighting. It is a small thing, sure, but when a horror film in the crowded landscape of modern Hindi movies asks you to take its supernatural stakes seriously, a slightly ill-fitting winter garment in a tropical setting tends to distract the eye away from the ghost standing behind the hero. That ghost is Shireen, played by Sonarika Bhadoria with a heavy reliance on theatrical dry-ice and wide-eyed stares, operating under the direction of Rajiv S. Ruia who seems to have watched Raaz once too often while nursing a migraine. Bollywood has a long, slightly embarrassing history of trying to import the visual grammar of mid-budget Hollywood fright flicks into domestic storytelling without bothering to secure the lighting budgets that make those shadows look like actual darkness instead of cheap muslin hanging off a C-stand. We are dropped immediately into a narrative about a singer with a dark secret—she vanishes into thin air when the clock strikes twelve or whenever the plot requires a convenient gap in dialogue—and a stoic businessman who falls for her voice before he even sees her face, which makes the subsequent haunting feel less like an existential curse and more like a very complicated administrative error. The screenplay by Sparsh Khetarpal lurches from romantic musical interludes on picturesque Mauritius beaches to stilted exposition scenes inside sterile corporate boardrooms without ever finding a gear that feels remotely human or rhythmically sound.

Sonarika Bhadoria does what she can with a role that requires her to spend fifty percent of her screen time walking in slow motion through fog machines while wearing white chiffon that refuses to get dirty even after rolling around in muddy forest clearings. Her line delivery has this peculiar, deliberate cadence, almost as if she is reciting verses from a pocket diary she left in the makeup van. Amir Dalvi shows up as the obligatory troubled friend who exists solely to look suspicious and deliver exposition about ancient curses using a tone of voice that suggests he would rather be anywhere else in the world, including a dentist's waiting room with a broken air conditioner. Rajneesh Duggal plays the lead role of Shirish with a singular expression of mild concern, a look one might reserve for a waiter who has brought the wrong side dish rather than a man whose girlfriend is actively disintegrating into CGI dust. There is a supporting actor near the hour mark playing a local priest or occult expert who is so clearly dubbed by someone working in a basement studio in Andheri that his lips move a full second after the audio track registers, and the resulting disconnect shatters whatever minuscule mood the background score was desperately trying to build. Speaking of the music, the recurring theme song plays at least eight times in the first forty minutes, sometimes over dialogue, sometimes during quiet romantic gazes, and occasionally just floating there in the background while nobody is on screen, hammering the viewer's ears until the simple act of listening becomes an endurance test.

The cinematography by Pratik Deora relies heavily on blue filters and hazy lens flares that make every indoor conversation look like it is happening inside a damp refrigerator, which might be an intentional atmospheric choice or simply a byproduct of shooting on older digital sensors with inadequate fill light. Rajiv S. Ruia frames his actors dead center in almost every single shot, creating a visual monotony that makes the ninety-minute runtime feel twice as long, dragging the viewer through repetitive sequences where characters walk down identical corridors holding unlit candles. The editing by Nitin Fichoot cuts away from reaction shots half a beat too soon, leaving us staring at an empty doorway or a blank wall while the ghostly whispers echo on the soundtrack, a jarring habit that drains all the tension out of what are supposed to be jump scares. It is hard to care about the romance between Shirish and Shireen when every time they are about to share a tender moment, the camera pans over to a dead tree or a flickering lightbulb as if the director is afraid we might forget we are watching a horror movie. Hindi films have occasionally managed to blend romance and the macabre with genuine emotional weight, but this particular effort treats both genres as checklists to be completed before the weekend box office reports come in. The themes of eternal love and sacrificial devotion are handled with the subtlety of a falling anvil, reducing complex ideas about grief and possession to a series of loud noises on the soundtrack and characters shouting each other's names in empty rooms.

The logic of the curse governing Shireen's existence collapses under the slightest scrutiny, raising questions that the script never bothers to address, such as why her supernatural powers only manifest when convenient for the narrative arc and disappear whenever the hero needs to drive a car for ten minutes without interruption. If I am being completely honest, the plot holes are wide enough to drive a fleet of production vans through, yet the film remains strangely devoid of the campy, self-aware charm that sometimes makes terrible cinema watchable on a lazy Sunday afternoon. It takes itself far too seriously for a picture featuring glow-in-the-dark contact lenses and poorly rendered spirits that look like they were animated on a laptop in 2004 using trial software. Even the sound design feels lazy, recycling the exact same creaking door effect and wind howling samples from public domain libraries without mixing them to match the room acoustics of the various locations. When compared to something like 1920, which at least had the good sense to lean into its gothic melodrama with full-throated commitment, Saansein-The Last Breath feels like a straight-to-video pilot for a cable television show that didn't get picked up for a second season. The supporting cast members wander in and out of scenes with expressions of profound confusion, occasionally stopping to hand over a dusty book or warn the protagonist about a curse that everyone in the village already knows about except the audience. It is a curiously hollow viewing experience, generating no actual fear, very little romance, and a persistent headache caused by the aggressive treble mix on the dialogue track.

By the time the climax arrives in a dilapidated warehouse filled with hanging ropes and flashing strobe lights, the narrative has long since abandoned any pretense of coherence in favor of loud percussion hits and actors falling backward onto crash mats. There is no real sense of victory when the curse is supposedly broken, just a profound feeling of relief that the credits are finally rolling and the polo neck sweaters can be packed away in storage. The film simply stops rather than resolves, leaving minor subplots dangling like frayed cables and characters wandering off-screen without a proper farewell wave. It is an exhausting exercise in generic filmmaking that leaves zero impression the moment the screen goes black, lingering only as a vague memory of fog machines and blue lighting. You walk away wondering why anyone involved thought this particular collection of tired tropes needed another airing in front of an unsuspecting public.